‘Tell me more about the Oracle,’ he said. ‘Is it very ancient?’
‘Very.’
‘And the gods of the underworld … they are truly present there?’
‘Yes … when they are honestly invoked.’
‘Is that not always the case?’
‘Sometimes the power is … It is not always present.’
His voice was tighter as he said, ‘What happens then?’
She hesitated before answering. ‘The priests will have learned things about the seeker from his friends who wait above … while he is in the Painted Room. It is possible to know how to answer him in a way that …’
‘In a way that leaves him believing it is the god who speaks?’
‘Yes.’
‘And in my case?’
She turned her face earnestly towards him. ‘There was no deception.’
‘How am I to know that?’
‘Because you were there … you saw for yourself how the shade entered me.’
He resisted the intensity of her appeal. ‘It was dark and I was confused. I don’t know what kind of drug had been put in my water, but I’m sure there was something. I was in no state to see whether a deception was being practised.’
‘I swear to you that the Goddess was present between us.’
‘But you’ve already broken your oath to the goddess you serve. Why should I trust your word?’
‘Surely you must know by now?’ she said.
Odysseus frowned. ‘What? What must I know?’
‘Did you not see how I was?’
He thought for a moment, frowning. ‘Only that you seemed frightened by the power that possessed you. But you were wearing the Gorgon mask … how can I know what you were truly feeling behind it?’
He felt the hot reproach in her eyes as she glanced his way again before once more averting her gaze.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘was that the first time such a thing had happened to you?’
‘The Goddess has taken possession of me many times.’
‘Then I don’t understand why you would forsake her, ‘— again he caught the hot flash of her reproach — ‘except that it must have been a strong force to make you break your sacred bonds.’
‘Yes,’ she answered almost dully, ‘it was a strong force.’
‘But what force could be strong enough to make a priestess risk the fury of her goddess?’
She turned to face him then, her eyes a proud, unrelenting blue.
‘You,’ she said. ‘My love for you.’
And immediately turned away again.
His outward manner in those first moments suggested shocked bewilderment, but it concealed a deeper shock of recognition. He had desired this woman since he first set eyes on her. Hers was the first face he had seen on returning from that long journey into dissolution in Circe’s chamber. After that darkness in which his entire person had melted down like metal in a forge, her face had appeared to him as bright and lovely as the face of day itself. It had brought the promise of new life. And somewhere, without knowing what he was doing, he had been looking for that face everywhere ever since. Twice he had seen her — in the moments after he had broken the figurine of the goddess, and then again in the hot glade where, out of his fury and frustration with Circe, he had lifted Mopsa’s skirts. And how inevitable it now seemed that it should have been Calypso — the Hidden One — who was concealed behind the hideous Gorgon mask in the House of Persephone; that it should have been she through whom his mother’s shade had chosen to speak; and that she, in her turn, should now, symbolically at least, be smashing the figure of the Goddess by forsaking her duties at the shrine in order to follow him.
Yet how doubly strange that Calypso had been nursing her own desire for him throughout all those weeks without him suspecting it. The force that had them in its grip was Fate. Or so it had seemed at the time, when she first began to draw him under the spell cast by the power and urgency of her confession.
She told him that she had loved him from the day she first saw him walk alone into Circe’s palace resolved to rescue his friends. She told him that she had often spied on him from concealment, both when he came into the palace and as he went about his daily business in Aiaia. He had become, she said, the lodestone of her life, so that when his stubborn masculine will at last collapsed, and she was called by Circe to assist with the healing rites that were performed over him, she felt as though she was watching with tender care over the remaking of the man who must one day belong to her alone. She told him that it had been no accident that she had been present when he broke the ancient figurine of the Great Mother, and that she had even been following him on the day when he infuriated her by succumbing to Mopsa’s wanton sensuality. But Calypso had known that a time must come when he would descend to the House of Persephone in the Oracle of the Dead and she would be waiting for him there.
Never in all his life, not even when he and Penelope had first begun to love each other, had Odysseus felt himself so exclusively the object of a woman’s desire. Listening to Calypso’s passionate contralto voice was like being wrapped about by silken bands that left him feeling both held and confined; yet also enlarged. For if she was young — at least twenty years younger than himself — she possessed a degree of wisdom that was quite startling in its penetration; and she valued aspects of his character to which the world had been blind for many years. Where Circe had often left him feeling foolish and unripe, he began to bask in the way that Calypso fortified his self-esteem by recognizing the power of his intelligence. She claimed that it was more than mere resourcefulness, for its strength lay in his ability to perceive new relations between things in ways which revealed hitherto unsuspected possibilities. And his true courage lay, she declared, not just in military prowess, which many men could boast, but in his willingness to render himself vulnerable to experiences that transformed a man in the very depths of his being. Above all, Calypso believed that he possessed a capacity for love as deep as her own. Together, she insisted, they might celebrate a passion such as few mortals were privileged to know. All that was needed was for his wisdom and his courage to trust their love and follow it.
Of all of this, Odysseus was, at first, less confident than she. Her intensity alarmed him because he knew that if he answered its call, the whole course and compass of his life must alter. Yet he also knew that the ordeals of the war had already changed him beyond recognition. He was no longer the man who had left Ithaca many years ago. Were he to return there, Penelope would scarcely know him; and what he had undergone on Aiaia had given him, he believed, a more exhilarating sense of feminine power than anything he had ever known in the simplicities of his married life.
‘I watched the old Odysseus die,’ Calypso avowed, ‘and I have seen you reborn. If I am here with you now it is only because I too have undergone such transformation. I believe that the powers of both god and goddess have come to meet in us. They have done so for a purpose, and the deepest betrayal would lie in our failure to honour what their meeting asks of us.’
Listening to the voice of the blind bard of the Phaeacians echoing through the hall in Scheria, Odysseus sighed to remember how swiftly, and impulsively, his life with Calypso had begun. And there was no denying that they had given themselves to each other with a passion that seemed at times as divine as that which had once tied Ares and Aphrodite in its golden fetters. In the rapture of their lovemaking, Odysseus had come to understand for the first time the true strength of the power which had possessed Paris and Helen many years earlier, and thereby dragged the whole world into a disastrous war. And even now, for all the storms of mutual hurt which had blown between them, Odysseus could not entirely regret the passionate years he had spent on Ogygia with Calypso, though his sighs deepened at the memory of her face as he left the island.
Those sighs did not pass unnoticed. Queen Arete, who was sitting beside him, remarked that her guest seemed sad and wondered whether there was some solace he might be offered.
So sympathetic was her smile that for a moment Odysseus was on the point of confessing all his troubles, but he had no wish to cloud the general air of conviviality in the hall, so he merely said that he had been thinking of the comrades he had lost at sea and how much they would have enjoyed the comforts of this handsome palace in which he was fortunate to find himself after his own narrow scrape with death.
‘We count ourselves fortunate to have you among us,’ King Alcinous said, and then leaned closer to Odysseus, smiling confidentially. ‘By the admiring glances my daughter Nausicaa keeps giving you, I judge she counts herself lucky too. She’s of marriageable age, you know, though she seems to disdain most of our young men. However, I’m beginning to wonder whether she thinks a husband might have been cast up at her feet by some friendly god?’
Briefly Odysseus averted his eyes in embarrassment, only to see Nausicaa gazing at him from where she sat among the maidens further down the hall. She flushed at once as their eyes met, and glanced away. ‘I could never consider myself worthy of so fair a prize,’ he prevaricated.
But Alcinous had not failed to observe his moment of discomfiture. ‘Or perhaps you’re thinking of your homeland,’ he said, ‘and longing to be away? If that’s what your heart desires, friend, one of my ships will certainly take you there. But tonight you shall have the best of our entertainment. I swear you’ll find no finer bard than our Demodocus between here and Egypt. ’ Raising his voice, the king called across to the hearth where the blind bard was drinking from a silver goblet.
‘When you’re refreshed,’ he said, ‘give us your song of the fall of Troy.’
Before Odysseus could think of a polite way to suggest some other theme, Demodocus put down his goblet and retuned his lyre. A hush fell over the hall. The minstrel lifted his voice and Odysseus found himself listening to a heart-stopping account of how he had conceived the stratagem of the Wooden Horse, and how he and his companions had entered Troy, and of the devastation that had fallen on the city during the course of that terrible night.
Unaware that the man of whom he sang was seated among his audience, Demodocus gave voice to a paean of praise for the courage and intelligence of Odysseus; but so painful were the memories it evoked, and so great the gulf between the horror that Odysseus recalled and the stirring beauty of the poet’s verses, that long before the song was over, tears were streaming in silence down the Ithacan’s face.
Everyone else was so caught up in the song that only Nausicaa observed his distress. Rising from her place, she crossed the hall to comfort him, and when Alcinous saw what was happening, he put his hand on the stranger’s arm. ‘The song moved us all,’ he said, ‘but it seems to have affected you so profoundly I can only think you were among those who fought at Troy … or perhaps that someone dear to you was killed in the war for that noble city?’ And when he saw that Odysseus had regained a measure of control over his breathing, he added, ‘Come, friend, I think it’s time you told us something of who you are.’
Seeing the small eddies of grief still shaking through his body, Nausicaa said, ‘Won’t you at least tell me your name?’
He lifted the grief in his eyes to meet the concern in hers, and heard the girl draw in her breath as he answered, ‘My name is Odysseus. Odysseus of Ithaca.’
Many years earlier, in the draughty hall at Iolcus, when he was still a young man, Odysseus had persuaded the hero Peleus to unburden himself of his sorrows. Now during the course of that night in Scheria, Nausicaa performed the same tender service for him. Almost as though speaking of another man - an old friend that he had known and cared for well — he told them of how his heart had been shaken by the fall of Troy and of the way his life had been haunted by images of that atrocity. He told them of the death of Hecuba in Thrace, and of how he had lost his cousin Sinon and many comrades in the skirmish at Ismarus. He told them of the great tempest that had scattered his fleet and how, having failed in that storm to double Cape Malea, he had fetched up on the shore of Libya. He told them of his encounter with Guneus and of the fruitless journey he had made to the shrine of Neith beside the great salt lake where Athena was born. He told them of what had happened among the wind-callers of Aeolia and of the loss of the Swordfish under the assault from the Laestrygonians. He told them how he had come to Circe’s palace on Aiaia and how his life had been transfigured by the healing rites that he underwent in her care. Less freely he spoke of his initiation at the Oracle of the Dead at Cuma and how the shade of his mother had spoken to him there. And then, more haltingly, he tried to explain how it was that, instead of returning home to Ithaca as he had intended, he had fallen under Calypso’s spell and remained with her on the island of Ogygia.
Once again he was weeping as he told how his crew had grown restless there and he had allowed them to take his ship roving through the western seas; but they had met with no good fortune and, in the end, they had landed half-starved on the island of Thrinacia where they had killed and eaten some of the sacred Cattle of the Sun. Not until a long time after his ship had failed to return did Odysseus learn how the god had taken his vengeance on them. Damaged in a storm, The Fair Return had lost steerageway and been sucked down by a whirlpool in the narrow straits between Italy and Sicily. All his old comrades were drowned in the wreck except for the Libyan boy Hermes. Found clinging to a spar by a Phoenician merchantman, and stricken with grief at the loss of his friend Eurylochus, Hermes had eventually managed to make his way back to Ogygia.
But by that time things were going badly wrong between Odysseus and Calypso. Oppressed by her exclusive demands, increasingly guilty that he could no longer honour the passion that had brought them together, he was further estranged from her now by his grief for the death of all the friends and comrades he had loved. Eurylochus, Baius, Grinus, his herald Eurybates and the rest … all gone. Odysseus blamed Calypso for keeping him at her side when he should have been at sea in The Fair Return, watching over his crew, seeing them safely home. His complaints grew ever more unjust. He had thanklessly betrayed Circe’s trust for her. Had it not been for her sacrilegious passion, he would have been at home with the wife who loved him many years ago. He would have met and come to know his son. He would have been happy as he could never hope to be happy, rotting away in amorous sloth on this uneventful island.
Yet even as he ranted, Odysseus saw the unfairness of the hurt he gave; so he turned his rage against himself, which only made Calypso weep more grievously, and the day ended with them making love in tears once more.
Yet the harm was done. He had quarrelled with her before, but never with such rancour, and out of the heat of his grief and rage he had said things which had a terrible ring of truth about them. His words had trespassed beyond hitherto unspoken boundaries, and they could never be taken back. Both understood it, and neither knew how to cope well with the silence that resounded in their wake.
Odysseus spent more and more time alone, and with each passing day he found he was filled with longing to return to Penelope. His dreams ached with images of her patiently working at her loom or nursing the infant Telemachus in her arms. In his waking hours he recalled the respectful care she had always shown to his parents, and how quickly everyone on Ithaca had come to love her. Penelope was all modesty and grace and good humour, quick witted and with a sprightly tongue; and if their youthful lovemaking had never been quickened by the same sensual flame that burned between Calypso and himself, the fault was his; and it had been, in any case, as beautiful as it was tender.
The more he thought of these things, the more inconceivable it seemed that he could have forsaken such a wife for the madness of war, or that he had not hastened back to her as soon as he felt himself fit to do so. There were so many things he was sure he had come to understand about himself, and his relation to the feminine powers of life, during his stay in Aiaia; yet no sooner had he come away than life had expanded around him again, and left him floundering. Yet how was it that after all the transformations he had undergone, he had so quickl
y allowed himself to become trapped by the sexual allure of a woman half his age?
But that was not the whole story. Odysseus understood that if Calypso had dared to renege on her most sacred vows, it was entirely out of her love for him. It was through that love that she had glimpsed a vision of a richer life than that of an unrequited virgin serving the gods of the underworld in the halls of the dead. Acting bravely on that love, she had put her life at risk to be at his side, and her desire for him remained undimmed. And there was more, much more; for in taking off the hideous Gorgon mask she had worn in the House of Persephone, and revealing the love that lay behind it, she had confirmed the truth of everything he had begun to learn on Aiaia.
He remembered how Calypso had first made that truth utterly plain to him when he tried to tell her what he had come to see in the solitude of the Painted Room at the Oracle of the Dead. ‘Of course,’ she had answered smiling, ‘that is exactly how it is. If you refuse to know the radiance of the goddess in her darkest aspect, and to include that darkness in your rites, then she will return again and again in the image of your own dark violence. And the theatre in which she will perform her operations on your heart and mind is war; and if you ask why that should be, she will answer it is because she cannot finally be left out of count, and you will have left her with no other way to speak.’
Her words had struck him with the force of revelation. In those moments all the ordeals of his life had seemed to fall into place with visionary clarity. Out of that shared vision Odysseus had at last renounced the life and values of a warrior. Forsaking Ares for Eros, he had chosen love instead, and devoted himself to a quiet life of peace on Ogygia with Calypso. And for a time that life had seemed complete; so when he tried to speak to her now about his increasingly wretched condition, it felt as though every word he uttered was a betrayal of that vision. Certainly she experienced it so. It was a betrayal of their vision and a betrayal of their love, and she swore she would die sooner than let him go.
The Return From Troy Page 45