The Lost Books of the Odyssey (14 page)

I woke to blood and agony and darkness. Staggering to my feet, I lashed out and felt my fist connect with resilient flesh. I put my hands around the spear with which I had been mutilated; vitreous humor trickled down my face and I knew with nauseous certainty that I would never see again. I drew out the spear and lay about with it, feeling their bones crack through the shaft. I bellowed and pressed the attack, not caring if I blundered into an outstretched sword. Commotion, hoarse panicked voices and motion in every direction. With mortal intent I made a mighty thrust toward the closest whisper but struck the wall—the spear broke in two and I was left holding a fragment of the haft, just big enough for a torch. I stopped and listened—it was silent but for my heart and my breathing. They had gone.

I put my hands to my ruined face, then bound the wound as best I could and staggered down the steep path to the sea. I thought I heard their oars on the water and raged at them, wading out into the surf, flailing at the waves, finding stones by touch and hurling them. I might have heard Nobody’s voice but with the breakers and my shouting I could not be sure.

They were gone and I got cold. I was not quite brave
enough to drown myself. I shouted for my father—I did not love him much but he knew his duty and I thought he would avenge me. If he heard me, he gave no sign. I crept back to my cave and the pain, which had been waiting at a distance, engulfed me.

Fever came. I lay by the fire, chilled to the bone, too weak even to go to the well. At first the fever was low and I was transcendently calm and thought I had at last found true philosophy. As the fever rose and rose I started to shake uncontrollably. A young man with golden hair appeared, standing patiently in the shadows, watching me, leaning on a staff around which snakes twined (of course, if there had been such a man, I would not have seen him). In the dream, as the pain deepened he came more and more into the light and I thought he would speak to me but just then my father arrived and sent him away. He laid his vast hand on my forehead, as cool as the deeps of the sea, and I told him that it was Nobody who did this to me and must die.

The fever broke soon after that and I lay awake and alone in my cave, facing a future of darkness. I groped in the dust and found cheeses, my staff, a bucket, the empty wineskin, the cold ashes of the fire, a pile of furs, and the sharp end of the spear that had blinded me, still sticky with dried blood and matter. I sat down and I think I would not have got up again if not for my goats, who butted their heads against me and clamored to be milked.
This I managed to do, and then shooed them off to their pasture and laid out their salt while they bleated and had their little quarrels.

The days were long and there was no sun to dazzle me. I wondered incessantly about the man who had brought me a sack of wine, a tale and blindness. In my mind I replayed everything he had said, trying to reconstruct each tone and nuance. He had not uttered a single true word, of course, but we are revealed in our lies. His and his men’s clothes had been thrice-patched stuff but their helmets and arms were keen edged and mirror polished. They had carried their arms with a total casualness, their weapons extensions of themselves, like veterans old in war. They had accents, the like of which I had never heard before, so I reckoned Nobody and his men must be from far away, out toward the edge of the world.

My hatred of Nobody was impotent and all-encompassing. I wanted to be free of it, but always my mind went back to him. I told myself and the goats stories about him—one day he and his men were pirates from Corsica, vicious raiders out to prey on anyone they could overwhelm or surprise. The next they were a party of pilgrims bound for Delphi who had stopped on my island for water and found me only through misfortune. But their ragged clothes and gleaming weapons, their hardness and loneliness and hunger made me decide in the end that they were coming back from a long, bloody war, fought far from home, a war that left them with eyes
as blank and hostile as birds of prey, raiding and killing as the opportunity arose, knowing no life but arms and no law but violence.

I invented perils for his trip home—horrors rising up from the deep sea, the endless asphodel fields of the dead, sweetly singing witches to gull and bind him—but I could never quite bring myself to finally close the sea over his head or the jaws on his throat. Always I pulled him back, unwilling to let him escape into death. As his trials mounted (all of which scarred him, took some vital piece of him—I needed him alive, not whole), I saw that he must have some good reason to go on living, for, as I have often reflected, it is a simple thing to give oneself up to the sea. So I gave him an island like mine, not good for much but raising goats and men, and a wife of perfect steadfastness (the mirror image of the woman I knew so long ago).

I invented perils for his trip home—horrors rising up from the deep sea, the endless asphodel fields of the dead, sweetly singing witches to gull and bind him—but I could never quite bring myself to finally close the sea over his head or the jaws on his throat. Always I pulled him back, unwilling to let him escape into death. As his trials mounted (all of which scarred him, took some vital piece of him—I needed him alive, not whole), I saw that he must have some good reason to go on living, for, as I have often reflected, it is a simple thing to give oneself up to the sea. So I gave him an island like mine, not good for much but raising goats and men, and a wife of perfect steadfastness (the mirror image of the woman I knew so long ago).

In retrospect, it is obvious that “Nobody” was a
nom de guerre
, the alias of an anonymous raider. The choice of sobriquet suggests a man infatuated with his own cleverness. He carried himself like a warrior, but preferred getting me drunk to attacking me openly. His mind, I thought, must be like a city of a thousand twists and turns, founded on deceit, with never an open line of sight or a straight passage. Fluent in lies, he must have been the death of many men greater than himself. And he was loyal to his men, or so I liked to think, as it increased my pleasure in making monsters pluck them
from his ships while he stood by helplessly, and in making their ghosts weep for burial.

The island farmers are less timid now that I am blind. They bring me fruit and salted meat and listen with more than polite interest while I tell my stories. Some parts of the tale have gelled over the years, though others I improvise or vary as suits the audience’s mood or mine—even now it gives me pleasure to invent new sufferings for him. For all that, my bloodthirstiness has lessened—I no longer groan in my sleep or dream of catching him and wrenching out his bones. The ruin where my eye was is not painful anymore, and my days are calm, even joyful. Sometimes I think I am grateful, that sight would be a distraction.

I
n his sojourn in the land of the dead Odysseus saw Penelope among the listless shades. With his broadsword he cleared a path through the muttering ghosts but she receded, seeming not to see him. He called out her name and chased after her, leaving his men behind, catching up with her in a dark glade full of asphodel where she sat at a loom weaving a long shroud. He made to speak to her but, remembering the ways of the dead, used his sword to dig a small pit over which he opened a vein.

She was drawn to the blood and drank, something like light coming into her eyes. “It is no kindness to bring the dead back to themselves. We are wretched but do not know it until you remind us. Why have you come to trouble me, stranger?” she said, looking up from where she knelt in the dust with red streaks on her white face.

“I am a traveler from Troy who has come a long way with Odysseus, your husband,” he said. “What cruel fate
befell you that the deep-thinking hero must now return to a cold and empty hall?”

“You lie,” she said apathetically, “Odysseus is no more. When he had been gone ten years and a little more I went to Delphi to learn what had become of him. I gave the priest a silver bowl embossed with sphinxes that had been part of my dowry. He led me down into a cave dark as a womb where it smelled of wet stone and hot metal. I asked the shuddering oracle, whom I heard but could not see, whether Odysseus would come back to me. ‘No man will return to you, but not for a long while,’ she said, and all my hope fell to the floor.
^*

“Back in Ithaca, many men sought my hand. I told them I would marry when I had finished my husband’s funeral shroud, and I kept weaving it and weaving it. They grew impatient—they pled and reasoned but were working themselves up to violence.

“I wanted to secure my son’s patrimony. So I sent Telemachus off to visit Sparta and when he was gone gave a feast to which I made a point of inviting every man who had courted me. I let it be known that by the end of the feast I would be with the man who would be my husband. The wine was poisoned—painful and slow, but sure. I drank first. And so I made a liar of myself, for
though I have searched every vale of the shadowlands I have not found even a rumor of him.”

“Would you know your husband? Do you not recognize me, at all?” asked Odysseus gently.

“Yes, I recognize you. You are the living, come with all your heat and blood to trouble my shadows and dust. Traveler, begone from here.”

“But I must come back once more when my days are done and then, finally, you will be waiting for me,” he said and reached out to touch her cheek but she slipped away like a fish in a stream.

*
It was a little more than ten years after leaving Ithaca that Odysseus encountered the cyclops Polyphemus and as a
ruse de guerre
said his name was Noman.

S
ince you ask, I will tell you. So drink your wine and take your ease, traveler. The nights are long in Ithaca and tomorrow will look after itself.
^*

I was born on Limnos, an island far west of here, the last place the sun rises. The farms on Limnos are scattered and the people are taciturn, miserly and dishonest. The king was Tethios, my father, a grim, silent man. Our house was on a white hill on the westernmost point of the island. On the beach the bones of a ruined temple protruded from the sand and I would play among its weathered stones while Nurse watched me.

Nurse was a Phoenician with a face like a blade and a body like an arrow. Now I know that no one would call her desirable but to me she was beautiful. My mother stayed in bed in a darkened room and my father had no
interest in nursery matters so she and I were left to our own devices. She would sit me on her knee under the oak atop the hill and in her own language tell me stories of her home, Tyre, the island city, where the sea was the moat and the walls so high that hundred-year waves broke on them without wetting the battlements. She told me how Heracles, also called Melquart, had been the slave of a wicked old king who told him to go and sleep among the waves. Heracles threw a great white stone into the sea to be his bed—the wave from the stone drowned the king’s subterranean palace, and the stone itself became Tyre’s foundation. She told me of the fire roaring in the belly of the idol of Baal, how the priests bound children with cords and cast them into the flame to appease the god’s hunger. She told me of the dye-works where women ground the murex,
^*
dripping crimson to the elbows like a coven of murderesses. She loved me as I loved her, I think, and anyway no one else wanted her.

Early one spring, a Phoenician trading ship dropped anchor in our harbor. There was a general air of holiday as everyone on the island went down to see what they had to sell. Nurse was especially excited, as she had not spoken her mother tongue to anyone but me since my father took her for a slave. She stood on the shingle rattling away with the traders while the other women
picked over amber, knives and linen. All smiles, their captain brought her aboard to drink wine. I sat on the sand and heard them laughing.

The next morning she told me to look after myself and hurried off. I followed her at a distance, and saw her go into the woods with the captain. I hid behind an oak and heard her tell him that she was the king of Tyre’s daughter, abducted so many years ago, and still homesick. “Tomorrow we go and you should come with us,” the captain said. She laughed with pleasure and said she would and she might bring Tethios’s most precious treasure with her, for all that it was getting too big to carry.

The next morning when the tide was in the offing the Phoenicians sent a messenger to the court with their goodbyes and a gift for the queen, a necklace of rough gold and amber. While the women passed it from hand to hand, Nurse slipped away and made for the ship. I overtook her not far from the anchorage, and, weeping, asked her how she could bear to leave me. She gave a start and comforted me, smoothing back my hair, explaining that she was leaving me because I was my father’s only son and I would miss him. I said I would miss no one but her. So we went on the ship together, and she held my hand and ignored the sailors, who ignored us in turn, as though we were ghosts.

Limnos faded behind us. Nurse took ill and kept to her berth, her face turned away from me. On the fifth day out she stopped speaking and on the sixth she
stopped breathing. She went into the sea with little ceremony, swung over the side by sailors with wooden faces, her lover among them. They spoke in their own tongue (not knowing I understood them) of taking me back to Limnos for ransom, but decided it was too risky, and that anyway I had some value other than as a king’s son. Their talk of profits cheapened my mourning and it was a relief when we came to Ithaca and I stepped ashore a slave.