‘So you see,’ he ended at last, ‘this is what I have become.’
‘But your story has not ended yet,’ Circe responded. ‘And even the tale you tell might be told another way.’
‘I’ve given you the truth I have,’ he glowered. ‘No one has been given more.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ she smiled, ‘and clearly you are not as blind as you led me to believe. But you see your life as the Cyclops of your dream might see it — with only a single eye; and that way it is impossible to see how things relate in depth to one another. If you wish to become Odysseus again, then we must talk more. And talk alone will not be enough to recover your self for yourself. There are things that must also be seen and done and undergone.’ Again she looked up at him sharply. ‘You must earn that flower that you wear above your heart. I warn you, it is not won without suffering.’
‘I’m no stranger to suffering,’ he answered.
‘No,’ she nodded as if in agreement, ‘you have suffered much in your travels. But they were journeys out across the world. There is another kind of voyage a man might make. Are you ready for its risks, I wonder?’
It was not decided at once. All that was agreed was that Odysseus would sleep in the palace for what remained of the night, and that a messenger would be sent to The Fair Return to let his crew know that he and his men were safe and well. The next morning he would meet those of his friends who were already in the palace, and he and Circe would talk again. If he decided that he had no wish to remain on Aiaia, then there was nothing to prevent him leaving.
When Odysseus met his missing men the next day he found them unharmed. Most of them, like Elpenor who greeted his captain with an apologetic grin, were simply content to have passed the night in a heightened state of sexual pleasure; but Polites seemed to have experienced something deeper, of which he professed himself unable yet to speak, and Macareus was evidently transformed by whatever had happened to him during the course of the rites. The eager light which had been banished from his face by the death of his sister had returned to his eyes, and where he had been almost speechless on the voyage out of Aeolia, he was now voluble in his desire to remain in Aiaia.
‘It is what Canace and I always dreamed of,’ he said to Odysseus when they were alone together, ‘a realm where the Goddess is revered as the very portal of life itself. But there is more, far more … a true mystery … something I would never have believed possible, and that is the real reason why I won’t keep company with you if you decide to leave today.’
‘Are you able to say what it is?’ Odysseus asked.
‘It is a secret thing,’ Macareus said below his breath. ‘You must swear to keep it so.’
Reflecting that this eager man was making a poor job of keeping the secret himself, Odysseus said, ‘You have my word.’
Macareus ran a hand through his white hair, trembling with excitement as he spoke. ‘The woman who accompanied me yesterday … we talked intimately together … she searched out the causes of my grief, and when I told her my story … of my love for my sister and the manner of her death … she said that there were rites known to her people by which I might speak with Canace again.’
Odysseus studied the fervour in the young man’s face with dismay. Gravely he said, ‘Your sister is dead, Macareus.’
‘But what does that mean?’ Macareus answered. ‘And are the dead necessarily beyond our reach? This is the Island of the Dead, Odysseus. Those birds flying over the Hill of Silence are feeding on the flesh of one who died the day before we came here. To those who can see only that, death must seem to be the end of everything. But it’s the law of the Goddess that everything inherits everything else; and nothing that is real and true can die for ever.’ Macareus rested his hands on his friend’s shoulders. ‘Believe me, Odysseus, the people of Aiaia understand these things. They can show me how to live again.’
At once sceptical of these claims and strangely elated by them, Odysseus decided to remain for a time in Aiaia. When he spoke to Circe again the next day his sense of purpose and commitment grew. The length of the stay was extended, and though many of his crew were content to spend time ashore in a place where they could eat well and drink well and sport with the women of the island, by no means all of them understood why they were kicking their heels in this backwater when there were ships to be taken on the high seas, or towns to plunder and, if all of that grew tiresome, then a home awaited them in Ithaca. But when they tried to raise these issues, they found only that their captain seemed unduly preoccupied with the Lady of the island.
Not that he got to spend all his time with her. As Queen and Priestess, Healer of the Sick, Keeper of the Mysteries, and Guardian to the Gate of the Dead, Circe had many duties, and Odysseus watched with increasing admiration as she performed the public rites of her role. Clearly the people from many miles around Aiaia loved, respected and feared her in equal measure. She and her helpers treated the sick and dying with great care. She listened attentively to disputes and gave judgement fairly, without prejudice and often with good humour. Her lively presence could be felt everywhere as the intelligent genius of the place, yet her individuality was entirely subsumed when she wore the mask and robes of the priestess who conducted the dead to the Hill of Silence and later consecrated their bones in the island’s ancient ossuary.
When he met alone with Circe, their conversations often lasted for hours and were intense, exhausting affairs. Other meetings were cut short, however — insensitively so, it sometimes seemed to him, and not always for reasons that were made clear. Then came several, frustrating days when he did not see her at all, and during that time Odysseus found that his feelings towards Circe were undergoing turbulent changes.
Even when she had removed the elaborate ritual cosmetics she had worn at their first meeting, he saw that Circe was a woman of striking appearance. The angled eyes, the high cheekbones, and the aquiline nose above her almost Ethiopian mouth could be as impassive as a statue of Apollo at times; but at others they were quickened by her bright laughter at some of their more absurd misprisions, and he found that he had come to love the sound of that laughter. It wasn’t long before he began to believe that he was in love with its source.
When he first confessed this evolution in his feelings, Circe studied him gravely for a time as though he had advanced a mildly interesting business proposition. Then she said, ‘You mean you wish to make love to me?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he said, delighted that she had come so quickly to the point, though a little dismayed by her absence of excitement.
‘Very well,’ she assented. ‘You may come to my chamber tonight.’ And before he could say anything else, she returned him to the place where they had left matters in their unresolved exchange of the previous day.
By the end of that morning’s conversation his feelings were no longer quite as ardent as when he had first woken; but it had been a long time since he had lain in a woman’s arms, and Odysseus was not a man to give offence by failing to keep an assignation once it was made.
Wondering whether he had embarked on a huge mistake, he entered her chamber that night feeling like an untried boy. But the oil-lamps were discreetly placed, and the air of the room was fragrant with blossom and aromatic herbs, and she lay smiling in her great bed as though the half-naked man standing awkwardly across from her was a familiar and dear friend on whom she was glad to lavish her favours. A raised hand beckoned him towards her.
She revealed herself to be a tender, skilful and generous lover. So much so that Odysseus, who had been armoured against intimacy for ten long years, was overwhelmed by the generosity and refinement of her passion. His scarred body accomplished its climax in a torrent of tears, and he lay in her quiet arms for a long time afterwards, sobbing from the sheer joy of release at first, and later with the stress of conflicting emotions he endured.
Once his breathing subsided, they lay talking far into the night. Strangely, with no sense of embarrassment or indiscretion, he spoke
of his love for Penelope and the exquisite pain he felt each time he confronted the thought that he might never see her again. He spoke too of the son he had never seen, and of his own parents, and their love for one another and for himself as their only child. And soon he felt so large a yearning for Ithaca in his heart that he could contemplate no other possibility than that of taking ship next day and making speed for home.
But then he became conscious again of the woman lying at his side.
Falling silent, he reached for her again; but she raised a hand to his chest as he lifted his weight across her. ‘Be aware that we can give only this single night to Aphrodite,’ she whispered. ‘A time will soon come when your feelings for me will change into their opposite.’
‘Never,’ he protested; but she raised the tips of her fingers to his lips. ‘Believe me,’ she whispered, ‘in this as in other things.’
Though he was determined to prove her wrong, things turned out much as Circe had said. The ardour of that night proved transient. The next day she was cool and reserved with him, and he experienced the rebuff less as disappointment than as humiliation.
Thinking his manhood rejected by her, he rejected her in turn, comparing her severity with the less exacting charms of younger women. As she probed more deeply he began to fight fiercely over ground he might have conceded earlier. Yet even as he did so, he felt the ground slipping away.
Coming out of an abrasive encounter in which her dispassionate control contrasted with his own infuriated turmoil, his eyes fell on a small clay figure of the pregnant Goddess standing in its alcove in the hall. Circe had told him that it was very ancient and also very precious to her because she had discovered it when they were digging the foundations of her house. But someone must have picked the figure up to examine or clean it and then carelessly replaced it, for it now stood perilously close to the alcove’s edge. Wilfully, Odysseus brushed past it with his cloak and heard the clay shatter as it fell to the marble floor.
He winced at the sound and bit his lip. For a moment he might have walked on, but he turned and saw the thing in pieces.
With tears starting at his eyes, he dropped to his knees and began to gather together the broken bits. When he rose to his feet again he saw a young woman staring at him. She had been crossing the hall towards Circe’s apartment when the sound of the fall stopped her in her tracks. She stood in dismay now, lifting the fingers of one hand to the cleft of her chin.
‘It was an accident,’ he muttered. ‘I was careless.’ Concealing the tears, he glanced down at the fragments in his palm. ‘It seems the thing can’t be mended. What should I do with these?’
‘Give them to me,’ she said and came closer to take the painted terracotta from his hand. ‘This was very dear to the Lady.’
‘I know,’ he replied hoarsely.
But when he looked up again it was into a face of such poignant beauty that he could not understand how this girl had escaped his attention before. ‘Yet she is full of forgiveness,’ she said; ‘and you are very dear to her too.’ Then she blushed and turned away and was gone on silent feet across the marble floor.
When they were next together he confessed to Circe what he had done. She was feeding the house-snake as he entered and continued to do so as he spoke.
‘It was deliberate,’ he said. ‘I wanted the figure to break. I wanted it because it sometimes feels as though you’re trying to break me - breaking my heart, breaking my will. I wanted to smash something of yours.’
‘The figure was only clay,’ she reflected quietly, looking up from where the snake lay in her lap, ‘but you and I are flesh and blood. This thing is painful for both of us.’
‘I was stupid and brutal,’ he said. ‘Can you forgive me for that?’
Circe raised her eyes, reproaching not his crime but his doubt. ‘If we cannot forgive one another,’ she said, ‘what hope can there be for change?’
After that it was as if they were free to move through into a space where there was neither anger nor sentiment; only the serious and concentrated diligence of two hearts and minds looking for mutual respect and understanding across what seemed at times an unbridgeable divide. Yet each time they parted he was left with two irreconcilable feelings: that his presentation of his own perspective of things had been both cogent and complete; and that behind each exchange there was always present a veiled and silent figure that vanished whenever he tried to identify her, and who consistently refused to share that valuation.
Again and again they returned to the subject of the war. Whatever he might affirm to the contrary, Circe insisted that Odysseus was as much a casualty of the war at Troy as Queen Hecuba had been.
‘To suggest that the evil-doer and the victim of evil are as one in their suffering is to abrogate all standards of reason and conscience,’ he protested. ‘Hecuba is dead because King Priam and all her sons and daughters and grandchildren are dead; and if they are dead it is because I was the instrument of their murder.’
‘Yes,’ she cried, ‘yes, and again yes. But can that be the end of it? Can that be the whole of it? Thousands of men behaved as you did on both sides of that catastrophe and many with more enthusiasm. What is required now is that you understand the deep roots of that violence and allow that understanding to become part of yourself. Doesn’t the renewal of your life depend on it?’
‘But how?’ he demanded in frustration.
When she did not speak, he said, ‘Why do I always feel you know the answers to the questions you ask, yet wilfully choose to withhold them from me?’
‘Because those answers are my answers, earned from my experience. Were I to tell you these things you would only nod your head and forget them. You must see them for yourself. Otherwise they are nothing.’
‘How?’ he shouted. ‘I ask you again: how?’
Circe studied his petulant frown, aware once more that he was on the point of walking away from her. ‘You might begin,’ she said, ‘by thinking about the origins of the war.’
Impatiently he shook his head. ‘The causes of the war are obvious. One needs look no further than Agamemnon’s ambitions and the injury that was done to his brother Menelaus.’
‘That is the tale as the Cyclops might tell it. Look deeper.’
‘To what? To the madness of the gods themselves?’
‘That might be closer,’ she nodded. ‘I believe your bards have something to say on that score.’
‘The story of the quarrel over the golden apple, you mean, when Paris chose Aphrodite as the fairest of the goddesses because she promised him Helen?’
‘An interesting moment, don’t you think? But doesn’t the drama begin earlier?’
Odysseus frowned, casting back his memory, wondering why she was troubling him with old stories that, in the exhausting violence of the war itself, had been considered seriously by no one but the poets.
‘With the wedding of Peleus and Thetis,’ he said. ‘The last occasion when all the gods were present among us.’
‘All except one,’ she said.
‘Eris,’ he remembered.
‘Yes. She who was not invited.’
He said, ‘Who wants to have discord at a wedding-feast?’
‘Yet she came anyway, and because she was uninvited she brought trouble.’
‘In the form of the golden apple, yes.’
‘And why should that have caused such trouble?’
‘Because it was inscribed For the Fairest,’ he answered impatiently. “That was what started the goddesses quarrelling, and from that came the judgement of Paris, which led to the abduction of Helen, which was what started the war. Or so the stories say. But if the tale proves anything it’s that the goddesses can drive the world mad if they are not kept firmly in hand by Zeus. I’m surprised that you would want to remind me of it.’
‘Clever Cyclops!’ she mocked him, smiling.
And met only his baleful glower.
‘Your bards are men in the service of kings,’ she said. ‘That i
s how they choose to tell the story, as a competition among petulant females, each of whom behaves badly. But sometimes Truth also comes uninvited to the feast, though you have to listen hard for her amid all the noise the men are making.’
His eyes were averted from her, looking out across the green glade in the direction where his ship still idled in the harbour. There were better things for a man to do with his time than listen to old stories.
‘I have a question for you,’ she said. ‘Who is Eris?’
He shrugged impatiently again. ‘The answer is in her name. I’ve said it already. She is strife, discord, quarrelling.’
‘War?’ Circe added. ’Or at least the seed of it?’
‘Yes, that too, if you like,’ he said without thinking, wanting to be gone.
‘And Eris was there right at the start of it all,’ she said, ‘before Paris gave his judgement, before the abduction of Helen, long before Agamemnon’s ships set sail and Priam summoned his allies to the defence of Troy. She was present as the uninvited guest.’
She saw him frowning at her now, puzzled by the oblique line of her thought. ‘Something was left out of consideration,’ she said. ‘She was ignored, rejected, perhaps repressed. And there the trouble began.’
‘It might have ended there too,’ he said, ‘if each of the three goddesses had shown more maturity.’
Circe said, ‘if you have learned anything while you have been here on Aiaia, you will know that the Goddess is one and single like the moon. And like the moon she has four aspects, not just three. Name them for me.’
‘The new moon, the full moon, the waning moon, and …’ He hesitated there, thinking beyond the answer.
She waited.
‘The dark moon,’ Odysseus said, feeling a glimmer of dark radiance inside him as he spoke. ‘The moon we do not see.’
Circe nodded. ‘And where was she at the judgement of Paris?’
His thoughts were moving quickly now. Was Eris also an aspect of the goddess, the turbulent dark shadow cast by Hera’s bounty, Aphrodite’s beauty, Athena’s wisdom? But, ‘How could Paris be expected to judge what he couldn’t even see?’ he demanded. And then another thought struck him. ‘In any case the quarrel was among the goddesses. It was none of his choosing.’ Odysseus faltered, frowning. ‘At least, not until he was asked to choose.’
The Return From Troy Page 34