Penelope and Ulysses

by Zenovia

  There is something that is familiar about him.

  PENELOPE: Let me look. It is probably a trick.

  You can’t believe in the appearance of things.

  TELEMACHUS: Our dog knows him.

  He has removed his beggar clothes and has a sword.

  Mother! He is stained in blood.

  And mother, the lazy and fat suitors are not moving.

  They are all lying still.

  [Much noise and yelling is heard outside.]

  PENELOPE: Telemachus, let me look.

  I cannot see what you see;

  it is too dark and too many things,

  and people are broken outside this door.

  When this man comes here, you be ready.

  No indecision, for it will cost us

  our choice on how we will die.

  No hesitation.

  My sword will be ready to strike and strike hard.

  TELEMACHUS: I sense him to be my father.

  I smell the sameness of his blood.

  PENELOPE: My son, you were not made for war.

  You have the soul of a poet

  who seeks refuge in the world of love.

  My world and your father’s world has been of love,

  and then the world found us

  and caught us in its net,

  and we became hunters and the hunted,

  and still we kept the teachings

  of the fool and the lover alive.

  Get ready, to hold, hold the last breath.

  How sweet life is at the end,

  how sweet it is in the beginning.

  Get beside me and stay there

  for when his sword clashes with mine

  he will not aim for you.

  If you want love to remain in this world

  then you will have to protect it.

  [TELEMACHUS pick up a sword and weeps.]

  TELEMACHUS: I cannot kill. I cannot protect you.

  I cannot protect myself.

  The ways of the world are not my ways,

  and I am ready to leave as I was ready yesterday.

  Mother, you have taught me many things

  and my most loved teaching of yours

  is longing, deep longing.

  I cannot kill another.

  You taught me to worship and reverence life.

  I cannot kill this old man.

  He reminds me too much of my father. [sobs]

  PENELOPE: My son, it is your father and I

  who are damned for allowing others

  to deceive us into following a war we did not invent,

  to allow others to reward us for killing.

  As you cannot kill, I cannot do otherwise—I will protect you.

  You do not disappoint me, my son.

  You are different.

  You have gone further,

  and may your father and I become your bridge

  that will get you across the abyss

  and darkness of our world.

  We have different responsibilities in love, in life.

  Mine is to protect you

  and yours is to remain tender

  and free from spilling blood.

  [The stranger comes on stage. He is dressed as an old beggar. He is older twenty years, since PENELOPE has last seen him, and he is unrecognisable because of his unkempt appearance. He is covered in blood. His body language speaks of humility that time and loss has taught him. He has long, unkempt hair and a beard that is grey. But he is still a strong man.

  PENELOPE holds her sword ready for battle.

  TELEMACHUS is beside her.

  He realises who the stranger is and runs to him.]

  TELEMACHUS: Father, Father, Father!

  I knew it was you!

  [PENELOPE is still holding her sword, trying to pull

  her son away from the embrace of the stranger.]

  ULYSSES: My son, my son, how beautiful you have grown!

  I am told you have not spilled blood like the rest of us.

  Your mother has kept your mind and hands

  clean from this insanity,

  this plague of spiritual decay.

  The insanity of foaming dogs,

  the wolves, the jackals,

  the collectors, the hunters

  that see other men’s lives

  no more than that of insects.

  Insects that they must exterminate.

  My son, my son, I am ashamed for what I have done

  and for what I have allowed other men

  to influence me to do

  in the name of gain, profit

  and a better world, and the spread

  of our civilisation.

  Be wary of those who want to change the world

  with the spilling of other men’s blood.

  [ULYSSES weeps as he tries to wipe the blood off his son’s clothes.]

  I have stained you with other men’s blood.

  I have filled your young life

  with so much betrayal and human blood.

  PENELOPE: Who are you?

  [She circles him with her sword still ready for battle.]

  Take your hands off my son.

  He is innocent and believes the truth and the lies.

  [ULYSSES moves forward to PENELOPE.

  She puts the sword between them.]

  ULYSSES: My wife, my love, my lost and found life!

  Don’t you remember me?

  Have I aged so much

  that you do not remember me?

  I have not forgotten you.

  I have always seen your face in front of me.

  The sirens had your face

  and they even took on your voice

  to try to trick me not to return to you.

  All my strength, all my planning,

  all my scheming has gone into returning home.

  All my waking and sleeping moments

  have been filled with wanting,

  longing, aching to return to you.

  PENELOPE: You keep your distance.

  You look like my husband.

  Let me see the cut on your knee.

  [ULYSSES shows her the cut on his knee.]

  Yes, you have that. But that is not enough.

  This could be another trick.

  You could be evil in disguise.

  I am not going to put down my sword,

  and unless you have something

  more intimate to say about my husband

  prepare yourself to battle with me.

  No! Because you are playing the cruellest trick on me,

  prepare to die!

  ULYSSES: Penelope!

  [He kneels in front of her and puts down his sword at her feet.]

  I am your husband.

  It is right that you be sceptical of all

  who call themselves your friend, lover, or husband.

  I am Ulysses, returned to bring peace and freedom

  to you and my home.

  I carved for you, your bedhead.

  I remember you wanted the forest,

  rivers and even the pebbles

  carved on our bedhead.

  You wanted the tree to remain in the ground

  so that it would remain living.

  This tree will live as our love does,

  and when we have died this tree

  will hold us in its roots together.

  You told me how the tree

  keeps the world together with its roots

/>   and how it gathers the dreams of the heavens

  and brings them to us in its breath.

  You told me how you believed

  that a tree is like a great person

  that holds many life forms in it and on it,

  the tree where many can find shelter,

  dreams and vision.

  You told me the tree is your home,

  and when I could not be with you,

  the tree would bring you my dreams from the sky.

  In our youth you were the fire in my soul.

  In our old age, you are the inspiration in my heart.

  I have returned to find you divinely accomplished,

  beautiful in your wisdom and strength.

  My beautiful wife, my passionate lover,

  I have returned to you.

  I am now complete.

  You may strike with your sword or love me in our bed.

  [PENELOPE places the sword besides ULYSSES and drops to her

  knees with him.]

  Act VIII

  Whispers

  Colours of Sunset

  “This only is denied to God: the ability to undo the past.”39

  [The haunting and death of Ulysses, the whispers of the dead. PENELOPE and ULYSSES are together. The other voices are heard as a reaction to their conversation. It is a haunting. It is the decisions that ULYSSES has made in the past. They actually have an entity and voices of the different people from the past that move between, in and out of their thoughts and conversation with each other. These are the signs that ULYSSES is in the transition of his physical death.

  ASTYNAX: Hector’s murdered young son. Ulysses had an influence in the final decision to throw the boy from the Trojan walls to his death.

  ANDROMACHE: Mother of Astynax

  SIREN: Ulysses was the only one that heard the song of the sirens. He never spoke about it to anyone, but the song of the sirens has never left him, and it returns with the other phantoms of his life. He never told anyone what she sounded like or what she told him.

  DESTINY has Ulysses’s face and voice. In the classical literature and philosophies it was believed that all the decisions we make eventually become our destiny; therefore, destiny has the face of the core of our very nature: it has our face because it is us that have made all our decisions and arrived at our destination. This occurs at the end of man’s life, and there is nothing he can do to change his past actions, simply because he has no more energy or time in his life, and simply because you cannot bring the dead back, or the past to change it.

  It is clear that Ulysses, even though he is a tragic character, has made decisions that have caused destruction and the death of a young child. In this part of his life and death all meet up, and all voice their grief and pain. Ulysses cannot escape this on his death bed, nor does he want to escape it.40

  The SIREN approaches him: a beautiful woman, similar to Penelope as the sirens took on the image of the one we love the most.]

  SIREN: Ulysses, I am the siren who opened your heart

  and saw all your secrets,

  all the deep longing,

  and all the dark ambitions.

  You thought you were safe from my song,

  like your men whose ears were stuffed with wax.

  You were tied to the rails of your vessel.

  I found you and I have travelled with you

  and will travel with you.

  You and you alone have made me yours.

  Why have you not spoken about me to Penelope?

  Is this the one infidelity that you have not shared with her?

  I know you love me

  and that is why you have never spoken about me to anyone.

  Why did you not stay on the sea with me?

  Why did you not stay with me?

  You love me enough

  to have brought me to your bed with Penelope.

  And when you have made love to her,

  who do you see: her or me?

  Who do you long for: her or me?

  For I am the image and substance

  of the young Penelope before life

  and the weight of years and suffering

  aged the Penelope that shares your bed now.

  You might say you love her more

  because of her loyal character,

  but you still lust for me.

  Don’t feel torn, Ulysses:

  we are the same woman.

  You should not have tried to outwit the laws

  that are not written by man,

  the laws that govern man,

  the laws that hold everything

  in suspension and in balance.

  I am here with you now,

  in the birth of your death.

  [DESTINY enters. He looks and is the young ULYSSES. He comes close to ULYSSES and there ULYSSES stares deeply into the eyes of his DESTINY, the DESTINY he made with his decisions, the DESTINY that has his face, his teeth, his fingerprints. The man looks deeply into ULYSSES.]

  DESTINY: You can call me Destiny, Ulysses.

  I am your destiny.

  You moulded me to fit you.

  I am from the core of your nature,

  what you took from the world,

  what you shaped in the world,

  what you killed in the world,

  what you gave to the world.

  I am all your life on this earth;

  I am all your actions.

  Have you remained faithful to your path,

  to your journey?

  Did you risk yourself on the journey of life,

  or did you cut deep into your heart,

  or the heart of another?

  Did your choices follow you through your life?

  Did you make your choices on vanity and arrogance?

  Did they become your yoke of necessity?

  Did you bury the truth and invent your own?

  Did you choose to conquer?

  Did you want fame and wealth?

  Did you stop to think

  that for every privilege you took for yourself,

  someone else had to go without?

  Do you remember your wars

  and how many men you killed and why?

  Was it really self-survival, or was it something more?

  Lands? Armies? Wealth? Honour? Fame?

  Do you remember Troy?

  [ASTYNAX, a young child of about ten, enters Ulysses’s room: a beautiful, blond-haired boy, glowing with the promise of a full life. He goes to ULYSSES and takes his hand. ULYSSES recognises this child and trembles.]

  DESTINY: Do you remember this child, Ulysses?

  ULYSSES: It is Hector’s son, Astynax.

  ASTYNAX: I can see you, Ulysses, crossing the river,

  but this time you do not have a boat

  and there are so many unnamed creatures

  swimming in the river.

  I have waited for you, Ulysses.

  You, who dashed and broke my young life.

  You, who returned me to darkness.

  I have waited for you

  to return you to the other shore,

  the other life, the unseen one,

  where men do not kill children

  and they do not conquer to accumulate,

  for they are not lacking in anything in the other life.

  They watch the actions of the living

  and shake their heads in disbelief

  and say, “If only some had told me not to do that.”

  Is that how you feel now, Ulysses?

  In this world there are layers o
f different people.

  Some are under the earth

  and lick the human blood that man spills without thought.

  We call them furies.

  There are those that sit quietly in the shadows

  and suffer great sadness

  for all the things they have not done,

  for all the things that they have done:

  we call them neither dead nor living.

  There are those that we cannot find or see

  in our transparent and invisible world.

  There are the ones that have lived their lives,

  and have been in their lives,

  and have conducted themselves

  in balance with the laws of the living and the dead.

  They have not transgressed,

  or gone beyond the doors inscribed with:

  “all who enter here abandon all hope.”41

  We sometimes feel them

  on the wings of the birds

  or in the flicker of light.

  I could not move beyond and above into the wings.

  I needed and wanted to face you, Ulysses.

  Will you be gone another twenty years?

  There is no time in the other world.

  Have you gone to conquer another Troy?

  Or has life conquered you?

  Have you gone to save a world, any world,

  in exchange for the one that you burned to the ground?

  I am the child who was murdered in Troy

  You voted for me to be dropped from the walls of Troy,

  and there I fell and broke into a million pieces.

  I have come here

  to guide you back into the Wooden Horse,

  the Wooden House you thought about and devised

  to trick and conquer the weary, embattled Trojans.

  From that Wooden Horse

  at night you entered our beds while we were asleep

  and murdered all of us—

  children, women, old men, young men—

  and I was left alone, with only my grandmother, Hecuba.

  You took my mother from me for your servant.

  You could not let me live,

  I being the son of the most noble man, Hector,

  and you thought of another clever plan—

  “See if the child can fly!”

  I sense you wandering and searching

  to change things

  among the rivers of blood.

  You would change things now, would you not?

  And here our human frailty begins and ends.

  We cannot change the past.

  Agathon says, “This only is denied to God: