The Whispering Muse: A Novel

by Sjón

  ‘My mistress at the time was called Iphenoa. She was in her thirties and had been married to a lieutenant, for by this point in time the crew of the Argo had finished with the smartest district of the town and we were now servicing the needs of the women in the soldiers’ and artists’ quarter. Iphenoa had two nubile daughters. On the day of the race she accompanied me to the starting line and knotted a blue brocade scarf around my neck for luck. Her daughters harnessed the racehorses to the chariot, referring to one as Cat and the other as Death. These were giant beasts that the poets would have described as snorting fireworks, for Cat was of the same stock as Bucephalos, Alexander the Great’s steed, with toes instead of hooves, while Death was grey, with eyes of blue.

  ‘During the weeks I had spent in the women’s home, both sisters had tried in turn to entice me into bed, but unlike many of my shipmates I refused to serve more than one woman from each family, and never young girls. The maid servants were another matter – and here the daughters felt I was rubbing salt in the wound – for I was quite willing to roger the servants when the mistress was away from home. So I should have been on my guard. When Iphenoa had kissed me on the mouth and was leading the lieutenant’s daughters to the stands, the girls glanced back over their shoulders, smiling at me most oddly.

  ‘We raced five at a time, and in the second heat my fellow charioteers consisted of: Peleus, father of Achilles; Acastus, son of Pelias; Staphylus “bunch of grapes”, son of Dionysus; and the huntress Atalanta.

  ‘The latter competed on behalf of those celibates who took no part in the womanising but remained on board the Argo and guarded the ship under the command of Heracles.

  ‘The judge raised his arm. He let it fall.

  ‘The horses leapt into action. The charioteers yelled.

  ‘Then the sky was blue over Lemnos. Then the waves lapped the shore, then the limestone threw back the sunlight and the men’s skin shone until they seemed as insubstantial as immortals. Everything sang to the same tune; no ear could distinguish between the hoof-beats, the creaking of the wheels and the shouts of the charioteers.

  ‘Half an eternity passed in this manner.

  ‘I had driven no more than ninety feet when the spokes in the left wheel of my chariot gave way. As if by a miracle, Cat and Death broke free from the yoke and suffered no harm, but the chariot and ground collided with such colossal force that all I can remember is being hurled into the air in a forward trajectory and landing on the undercarriage, where I danced a brief tarantella before everything went black.

  ‘When I came to my senses Jason was standing over me, looking very grave. He said I had broken both my legs. I’m told that I smiled back at him as if it was nothing to make a fuss about. Then I swooned again and had no idea that my life was hanging by a thread. Next I woke to discover that my clothes were being cut off, and I was vaguely aware of a girl drawing splinters of wood from my chest, for which I was grateful. But when the wounds were stitched up without an anaesthetic, the pain was so great that I blacked out. I must have surfaced from my deathly coma like this several times during the first days after I was brought to the hospital.

  ‘I was in such a bad way that it’s a wonder Captain Jason bothered to have me patched up at all. For broken legs were not all that ailed me after the accident: on closer examination it turned out that I had been grazed on the hands and across the breast, a great wound gaped from my right eyelid to the nape of my neck. My diaphragm had burst when my lower intestines were thrust upwards, putting so much pressure on my lungs that I had difficulty breathing, on top of which I had bruised five of my ribs. My right ankle had shattered, my foot was twisted back and my thighbone had snapped at the ball joint on the left-hand side. This in turn had been stirred together in such a tangle that broken shards of bone had sliced through the muscle. The bones of my left hand had snapped, as had the fingers of my right. Both calves were also broken and split up to the knee joints; altogether, eleven bones were broken in twenty places. My left wrist and shoulder joints were sprained, and so were several other joints. And a large patch of my scalp had been flayed from my skull.

  ‘Now I owed my life to the fact that Jason son of Aeson had been fostered and tutored by the centaur Cheiron, the greatest physician of his age. As there was a risk of my healing in a deformed posture, being so soft and mangled, he resorted to “crucifying”me: nails were driven through both my legs and straps were tied to them, then belayed around two blocks on a pole at the end of the bed, and Jason tied a heavy sandbag to the end of each strap. Next, slings were placed under my knees which were then hoisted up, each weighed down by a sandbag. It took me two weeks to get used to the “cross” from which I was to hang for four months altogether. All that time I suffered from a nagging ache in the nail holes, though this was alleviated when I drank the wine that Iphenoa brought me every morning.

  ‘Before Jason could crucify me he had to bore holes through my legs below the knees, using a fairly hefty drill for the job. Apparently I told Jason that it would prove hard to drill through the bones of a man who had been granted the gift by blue-haired Poseidon of being impervious to sharp weapons. This proved correct, for the drill got stuck for an age in the bone, and one handle after another snapped off, but Jason broke through in the end and immediately started on the other leg.

  ‘But it was not only the toughness of my legs that betrayed my past. During the struggle to heal myself my body reverted to the shape it used to have before my metamorphosis sixteen years earlier. I myself wasn’t aware of this until one of the girls who helped me to breathe held up a mirror below my belly. I saw that my penis had shrunk until it exactly resembled the penis of a five-year-old boy, both in size and behaviour, and its proportion to a man’s body was like what you would see on a Renaissance sculpture (at last I understood why the nurses had been giggling at me). Moreover I had moulted like a wolf in spring. My chest was white and soft again – with the swell of maidenly breasts.

  ‘Yes, once I was a girl. My name was Caenis and I did as I pleased. We lived in Thessaly. My father, Elatus, was king of the Lapiths. He was a conventional man and the day I reached marriageable age he began to pester me to wed. It would certainly have been an easy task for the king to find me an eligible bridegroom – such as a hero who was both heir to a kingdom and a monster-slayer to boot – for I was famed throughout the lands for my intellect and radiant beauty. Indeed, I was so intelligent and fair that my half-brother Polyphemus used to call me Thena or Dite in an attempt to get a rise out of me. But as is often the case with independent girls, I paid little heed to my father’s talk of marriage: like the grass that bears hermaphroditic flowers and fertilises itself, I bloomed for myself alone.

  ‘King Elatus found the situation most unfortunate, and the same could be said of the suitors who had waited full of anticipation for the day when the princess would be offered up for grabs. The greatest champions on earth had gathered there, bold men and true; I would get to know many of them in my new life as a man since several were destined to be my shipmates on the Argo.

  ‘I was allowed to have my own way. The host of heroes moved on to the next country and commenced wooing the king’s daughter there. My father turned to more agreeable tasks than bickering with his daughter. And who knows, my existence might have continued in this satisfactory state had news of the obdurate girl in Thessaly not carried beyond our mortal world.

  ‘Not far from the city I had a secret refuge, a small cove that I liked to visit at the kindling of the morning star. At that hour there was nothing more translucent under heaven than the shallow sea between the rocks. The seabed was everywhere visible and the water, blue as an eye, grew lighter the closer you got to the surface, until it turned green, then vanished – and I breathed it in.

  ‘It was there that the god found me.

  ‘The cove emptied of seawater. It was as if a wet quilt had been stripped from the ocean floor. There’s a pretty shell, I thought to myself and walked over to a sugar-pink snail’s
house that lay on the sand. I bent down, picked up the conch and weighed it in my hand: well, I never, here’s a gift for Eurydice.

  ‘Then the heavy wave broke over me.

  ‘The surf raged in Poseidon’s deep, cold eyes as he flung me flat on my back and crushed me beneath his weight. I tried to scream for help but he forced my teeth apart with his blue fingers and spat a mouthful of raw wet seaweed inside. I tried to wriggle out from beneath him but at the slightest movement my flesh and skin were lacerated by the coral that covered his thighs, the barnacles that grew on his palms; it was better to lie still while the god laboured away on top of me, the shark oil oozing from his hair into my eyes. He did not cease until all the air had been knocked from my maidenly lungs and my veins were emptied of blood: then with a spasm of his hips he filled my body with seawater – his climactic groan echoed with the despairing cries of a thousand drowning men.

  ‘The briny sea flooded every inch of my body: my belly and heart, my joints and limbs, every sinew, every muscle, every lymph node and nerve – and wherever it went it felt like molten iron poured into the out-stretched hand of a child.

  ‘Poseidon was well satisfied with his rut, and in return for my maidenhead he offered me one wish. I curled up where I lay on the shore and whimpered:

  ‘“I wish I were a man so I need never again endure such an ordeal.”

  ‘These last words emerged in a deep masculine timbre, for the god had been as good as his word. And now that I was a man, Poseidon was generous to me, saying that from this time forth my nature would be such that no metal could harm me. He must have fore-seen that I would have to take part in many a duel to defend my honour against men and giants who doubted my prowess because I had once been a maid.

  ‘In my male shape I was given the name of Caeneus, and I remained in that form until the day war broke out between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, which was when the latter drank themselves into a frenzy at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia. A great battle was fought that you can read about in many books for it was considered one of the mightiest clashes of antiquity. When the centaurs had given up trying to shoot me with javelins and arrows or run me through with swords and knives – and I had managed to kill their leader Latreus – they resorted to bombarding me with rocks and huge tree trunks. I don’t know whether tales of how badly I had been injured on Lemnos gave them this idea, but they piled so much of the forest on top of me that I was forced to change shape or perish.

  ‘Long afterwards the poet Naso quoted my brother-in-arms and former shipmate on the Argo, the seer Mopsus, as saying that a dun-coloured bird had flown up from the pile and soared high into the sky in a wide circle above the battlefield. There it mewed sorrowfully before flying away.

  ‘It was a young herring gull that had not yet acquired its adult plumage.

  ‘It was I, Caeneus.’

  X

  It was nearly one in the morning on Easter Day when Caeneus broke off his story so that someone could comfort the purser’s lady friend who had burst into tears when he described the rape of Caenis. At first she had borne up bravely, clamping her hand hard over her mouth and gesturing to the mate not to worry about her but to carry on, she would get over it. But when he said, ‘It was I, Caeneus’, a paroxysm of sobbing escaped from behind her hand and she wailed:

  ‘Oh, I can’t bear it!’

  The purser clasped an arm tightly around his lady friend’s shoulders. She buried her face in his chest and wept there a while. He stroked her hair gently, crooning something consoling, humming so deep in his chest that the melody vibrated low against her ear. The ensuing quiet gave me a chance to observe my dining companions’ reactions to this heart-warming spectacle:

  One word was written on all their faces:

  ‘DEFEAT!’

  Indeed, though the tune was meant for the purser’s lady friend alone, the song and the weeping were for all of us. Four years had passed since the end of the great conflict but we still couldn’t believe that humanity had won.

  The woman straightened up in her chair. She dried her eyes with her napkin, blew her nose, took a large gulp of water and said:

  ‘Right, I’ve had my cry.’

  The atmosphere relaxed a little and I got the impression that it was not the first time this had happened. The captain refilled our glasses. I drew attention to the lateness of the hour, which gave rise to a murmur of comment, but in spite of this Caeneus carried on from where he had left off:

  ‘As the first child’s cry sounded over Lemnos, I recovered my former physical strength and virility. But the Argonauts’ conditions had deteriorated so greatly during their stay in the realm of doe-eyed Hypsipyle that it didn’t seem wise to set me to work straight away. Instead I was quartered with Heracles aboard the Argo for our last three weeks on Lemnos. Nevertheless, I had achieved more than might be expected of a badly injured man: Iphenoa was more than five months pregnant and nine of the girls who had nursed me were with child by the time I was discharged from hospital.

  ‘Meanwhile, my crewmates’ lot during those spring days was such that even as the babies began to be born in the palace, they were finishing their duties towards the women in the paupers’ district and all that remained was to bed those who lived in the Street of the She-wolf; mostly prostitutes whom the queen had ordered to give up their trade – though the men did not find them particularly compliant. This combination of births and diminished living standards now finally had a dampening effect on the men’s ardour, and many became frequent visitors to Heracles and his lads, who had by now been guarding the ship for nearly ten weary months.

  ‘The visitors complained of their lot, moaning that they were kept constantly dashing from one end of town to the other, either flattening the straw with their verminous mistresses or lulling their infants to sleep in the palace apartments. And to crown it all, the mothers of their children were eager to start all over again.

  ‘A lesser man than Heracles might have made use of this discontent to foment a mutiny against Jason son of Aeson. He would have summoned the men to him by night, hoisted the canvas and sailed away, leaving the captain behind in the clutches of this strange nation of women. Instead he summoned Jason and they met by the side of the ship, at the crack of dawn, while I lay in my berth inside and overheard the whole thing.

  ‘It was the spring equinox.

  ‘I heard Heracles say:

  ‘“Tell me one thing, brother: who are the Argonauts? Are we hunted killers? Were we exiled from our lands for sacrilege or incest – forced to roam the seas like pirates? Why have we sat here so long, blockaded by women, going nowhere? Was it not our mission to achieve an impossible task? To triumph over monsters and witchcraft? To sail to the ends of the earth and return with a priceless treasure?

  ‘“Or do you intend your men to die of old age in the laundries of Lemnos, kneading the shit from the nappies of their base-born offspring?”

  ‘In that instant the spell seemed to lift from Captain Jason son of Aeson. He embraced Heracles, declaring that he had spoken well and justly, then ordered the crew to bid farewell to their mistresses and prepare the Argo for departure. He himself lay with Hypsipyle for the very last time, having by then begotten one son, Thoas, with her, and their lovemaking proved so potent that it resulted in another son, Euneus, who later became famous for providing the drink at the siege of Troy.

  ‘The Argo weighed anchor.

  ‘The wind was in our favour.’

  In the momentary silence that followed Caeneus’s last words, I seized the chance, before people started clapping, to strike my wineglass with a teaspoon, then rising to my feet I announced:

  ‘My dear shipmates! I must be permitted to say a few words. I wish to express my gratitude.

  ‘We have been on this voyage now for seven days and nights, soon to be eight, and it must be said that I have looked forward to every day. Throughout the voyage you have gone to great lengths to make my stay as agreeable as possible; Captain Alfredson has
allotted me a regular seat at his table, the radiator in my cabin breaks down and before I can say ‘Jack Robinson’ someone has repaired it; I am invited on one motor excursion after another; there is always hot coffee in the pot when I come in from my turns about the deck; the steward has ironed my shirts. And although at times discord has raised its head between us “supernumeraries”, it has always been resolved in the end. We are adults and know that it takes two to make a quarrel.

  ‘Here in the saloon the atmosphere has invariably been homely; we have had music and dancing, and Mate Caeneus has entertained us with his life story – fascinating stuff for the most part, if a little on the racy side. But you are young; after the war we awoke to a new world – and the words of Dr Pázmány, who predicted in 1927 that in the future sexual matters would be openly discussed at the dinner table, have been proved correct. Yes, high or low, young or old, you have shown me perfect amiability and respect.

  ‘And this evening you have humoured me yet again by having seafood for dinner; prawns and ocean clams with a creamy dill sauce on toast for starters, and poached salmon with potato gratin and melted butter for the main course. And although it was tinned, not fresh, I have no complaints. I feel as if my Nordic temperament has been revitalised by this excellent and intelligently concocted repast. Little did I suspect that the seeds of the ideas I sowed in your minds with my points about “fish and culture” would find here such fertile soil, would so soon bear such excellent fruit.

  ‘I thank you for that!’

  Raising my glass I looked over the brim at each of my table companions in turn. I took a sip. I raised my glass anew. Lowering it, I did not replace it on the table but allowed it to remain in my hand. And for the rest of the speech I brandished the glass to emphasise my words: