Penelope and Ulysses (4 page)

Music
is
heard.
‘Dance
for
Man’
(Nikos
Xylouris)
is
played
while
the
audience
is
settling
into
their
seats.
Projected
images
of
Penelope
and
Ulysses,
The
Tree,
and
the
sea
are
seen
in
conjunction
with
the
music.

Lights
slowly
come
on.
They
are
soft
and
dark
blue.
The
set
is
in
soft
night
colours
with
a
gentle
mist.

PENELOPE
and
YOUNG
PENELOPE
are
both
facing
the
audience,
looking
directly
into
the
distance,
into
the
audience.
PENELOPE
holds
her
sword
facing
downward.
YOUNG
PENELOPE
stands
beside
her.
She
speaks
the
first
two
lines
in
Greek—in
the
language
of
lost
and
found
worlds.
]

PENELOPE: [
Moves
forward
and
addresses
the
audience
.]

Exerte erthe apo to skotathi.

Exerte erthe apo to skotathi. [
You
have
come
from
the
darkness.
]

[
YOUNG
PENELOPE
moves
two
steps
forward
to
stand
by
PENELOPE
.]

YOUNG PENELOPE: You have come from darkness

to take parts of my life, to make it yours.

PENELOPE: You have come to recognise or retrieve

something that you have forgotten or lost.

YOUNG PENELOPE: You have come to see if love exists.

PENELOPE: Oh, by that I don’t mean

comfortable,
grey
, domesticated love.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I mean love that can break and shatter you

on the rocks of solitude.

BOTH: How much solitude can you bear?

PENELOPE: You have arrived at the precise time of my departure.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Ulysses, Ulysses!

Haunt me. Drive me mad with longing.

PENELOPE: I want to leave with you the despair and joy—

YOUNG PENELOPE: of a longing and searching,

of this love for this man—

PENELOPE: for no other man will do.

YOUNG PENELOPE: This love for an ideal,

this rebellious spark in my soul.

PENELOPE: This love that will not compromise

BOTH: The impossible choices of my nature and destiny.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Will you stay? Give me your hand

or at least your little finger.

PENELOPE: Please stay, so that I can pass on

the sirens’ song.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Did you know that sirens are mute?

It is their silence and solitude

that pierce the heart of your hidden world.

PENELOPE: You all know that the sirens’ song

is the opening of a man’s heart

to reveal either its fullness or emptiness.

And how much truth can you bear?

YOUNG PENELOPE: Do I have something that belongs to you?

Others seem to think that I have

something that belongs to them.

I have been kept under house arrest

by those who think that I have

something that belongs to them.

PENELOPE: Those men in my courtyard are not of my desire,

of my passion, of my deep sensuality.

They lack the salt of the sea in them.

They are not fish, only nets.

Their lives, their masculinity,

are nets used to capture the wild bird, the siren.

They would even settle for the tail of the mermaid.

They think I watch their nakedness,

while all the while I look beyond them

into the waves and turbulence

of the forever making and breaking sea.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I look to hear Ulysses.

PENELOPE: I search for the sirens

BOTH: Who have escaped the net of the hunter.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I follow the sea with my heart.

PENELOPE: Have you brought the danger

and beauty of the sea?

YOUNG PENELOPE: Once I found a bottle with a note

floating in the shallow waters

of another shipwrecked and sunken world.

BOTH: “There is the sea, and who will drink it dry?”
20

YOUNG PENELOPE: Ulysses, when we were young

you felt that I would drown

because I swam in the unmapped

and uncharted waters.

PENELOPE: I told you: in these waters

they do not throw nets.

You told me there are other dangers.

BOTH: The sea can seduce you and keep you.

PENELOPE: The sea has kept you from me.

Who can convince the sea to be reasonable?

YOUNG PENELOPE: We are like the bird and fish

that have fallen in love.

But where do we live?

In the sky? In the sea?

PENELOPE: Who would want to tame

the passion and desire

of the forever making and breaking sea?

YOUNG PENELOPE: I came from behind the sea,

and now where do I go

when it cuts me off?

PENELOPE: Do I want you to stay?

I can see you, smell you, sense you,

but something is preventing me

from touching you.

BOTH: We cannot touch,

I long for your touch. [
They
touch
their
breasts.
]

PENELOPE: We cannot touch

because we both are suspended . . .

YOUNG PENELOPE: Above or below our life together . . .

PENELOPE: But we cannot thread our lives

into the eye of time,

into the eye of the needle . . .

BOTH: That pierces the heart . . .

PENELOPE: And heat of the moment.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I know a lot about threads

and how far they stretch

and what happens

when they break and disappear.

PENELOPE: Sometimes you have to undo the tapestry

and start again.

But it is never the same.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Something has changed.

PENELOPE: Something is missing.

BOTH: Something is longing.

PENELOPE: What is missing is only the golden threads

that hook themselves into the human heart

and pull upon the other,

to an anchored and shared

destination.

It is only those threads that I weave

and spin in my arrivals and departures.

They lodge themselves in the heart.

YOUNG PENELOPE: In this pulling and tension

between what connects and separates us,

the golden thread that will not break

always pulls the anchor in my heart.

PENELOPE: We are both suspended

upon the invisible thread of a time

that does not meet the heat of the physical.

YOUNG PENELOPE: We are suspended like stars.

We watch the light of the other

but we cannot feed from each other’s heat.

Who are the philosophers who say

that the physical does not matter?

PENELOPE: I feel everything

through the longing of my body,

the longing of my deep rebellion.

BOTH: I am from another world, another time

that has burned into the fragility

of the passing moment,

the moment that has become my eternity.

YOUNG PENELOPE: For I am meant to live

from the moments I have had with you

for the rest of my life,

beyond and further

than any trained navigator can go.

PENELOPE: Ulysses, you have shipwrecked me

on an island surrounded by men

whom I must seduce

so that I can remain devoted

and faithful to you,

so that I keep you alive in me.

YOUNG PENELOPE: How do you seduce a man?

PENELOPE: Through sexual favours?

YOUNG PENELOPE: Through food and comfort?

BOTH: That is not seduction,

only a temporary need gratification

that one can get with anyone,

at any time.

PENELOPE: Seduction of all the senses.

I know the secrets of the sirens.

I know how to keep men

burning and longing.

I am from the hidden,

the unknown, the untouched.

YOUNG PENELOPE: For ten years they have lived outside me.

For ten long years they seek

my favours and choice

of one of them.

At any time they could have and can,

conquer, and steal what is not theirs.

Instead they wait for the prize.

PENELOPE: To taste and eat

from the seed of the seductress

who is both a bird and a fish.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Aren’t you glad that I learned to swim

in uncharted and unmapped waters

so that I can live

on this suspension of time, in longing?

Aren’t you glad that I swim

in uncharted and unmapped waters,

the darkest turbulence of my heart,

so that I can learn the secrets of seduction

that keep me in love and others desiring me?

PENELOPE: Like you, Ulysses, I am a navigator

and influence the burning of my vessel

so that you may see me,

but others can come and claim this fire.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Like you, Ulysses,

I seduce the senses of men . . .

PENELOPE: And influence their hearts to follow me . . .

BOTH: In preparation for their arrival and departure.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I am your love,

and yet I am unattainable

and absent from you.

PENELOPE: I am from your hidden world,

from your sunken world,

from your lost and forgotten ideals,

from the ashes of your youth,

from the sparks of your passion and desire.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I am the one you love,

the one you avoid,

the one you hide from,

the one you find too intense . . .

PENELOPE: too demanding,

too overwhelming

and yet you will not let me swim past you.

BOTH: Why do you keep me alive

in the ashes of your unspoken and unfulfilled?

YOUNG PENELOPE: Do you have any idea

the deep despair and aloneness

I retreat into

when I cannot hear your voice,

see the sea in your eyes,

feel your heat near me,

feel your heat on me and in me?

BOTH: I am Penelope the blesséd and curséd.

PENELOPE: In my courtyard

I have naked men that seek me,

and I desire and long for the absent,

the uncharted, the unmapped.

BOTH: I seek the journey of the heart.

I seek the body and seed of Ulysses.

PENELOPE: And there is my blessing and curse.

For twenty years I have ached for him,

longed for him, searched in the sea for him,

asked the sirens about the secrets of his heart.

BOTH: All remain silent.

All remain hidden,

unseen and still.

PENELOPE: Did you hear that?

There it goes again.

The creaking and moaning of a vessel

that has been on the sea for too long.

You all have come from the darkness

to take parts of my life,

to make it yours.

I have travelled into the unmapped

and uncharted worlds

of the searching, the seeking,

the deep longing of the heart.

YOUNG PENELOPE: The unfilled heart.

PENELOPE: The untouched desires.

BOTH: The fires that burn and keep me alive.

PENELOPE: I have waited for you to arrive.

You have arrived at the precise moment

of my departure.

BOTH: Will you stay?

PENELOPE: Will you take me with you when you leave?

Have you been searching

for decades or eons,

an eternity?

BOTH: “There is the sea and who will drink it dry?”
21

YOUNG PENELOPE: Have you brought

the turbulence of the sea with you,

in you?

PENELOPE: Do I want you to stay?

I can see you,

smell you, sense you,

but something is preventing me

from touching you.

YOUNG PENELOPE: The physical.

How I desire the physical.

Even my teacher Socrates understood

all experience comes through senses,

the blood of the physical.

BOTH: For I desire and know

only what is of earth,

sea, sky, and man.

PENELOPE: In my tapestry I weave the mighty breakers

that have shipwrecked me here.

YOUNG PENELOPE: In my tapestry

the salt of your tears

and seed can be tasted.