Odysseus: The Return

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  DARKNESS SOON caught up with me. I looked for shelter in the hollow of a solitary oak. I gathered up a heap of dried leaves and laid my cloak on top of them. The purple cloak that Penelope had woven for me so that I would feel enveloped by the warmth of her hands and her arms. I tried to sleep.

  The village of the centaurs had long vanished behind me, and the night was animated by rustling, furtive movements, growling, clicking, hooting. They would not disturb my slumber, I was accustomed to much worse. It was they, whoever or whatever they were, who would have to fear me.

  And yet that thought wasn’t enough to invite sleep. On the contrary. I was thinking that for days and nights I had done nothing but walk, always north and then always east, without ever encountering anything that was worth remembering, nothing that I could recount one day to my son or my subjects or to Phemius the singer. The only time I had stopped, because I’d felt a desire to mix with other human beings, I’d foolishly convinced myself that my quest was over and I’d been ridiculed.

  I was thinking that this would be my torture: nothingness, flatness, stillness, the useless spectacle of nature always repeating itself, always the same. Was I becoming immortal? Had I been assigned the endless empty territory stretching out in front of me, as Calypso and Circe had their islands?

  Was this the reason – this infinite solitude – that Hercules, after performing the twelve labours, had thrown himself onto the pyre alive?

  Everything had been taken from me: my comrades, my ships, my homeland, my father, my wife and son after I had rejoined them. My house. Must not this, what I was experiencing, be the threshold of immortality? I hadn’t asked for it. I’d refused it when it was offered to me on the island at the ends of the earth. I had defied the mouth of Hades to find my future! And I would not allow that endeavour to prove itself futile.

  I was sleeping, or perhaps I was in that half-asleep state where dreams and reality are blurred, when I heard a grunting. A sound I recognized: a bear. How could I defend myself? I didn’t have a heavy weapon with me and it was dark. I couldn’t climb the tree I was using for shelter, because it had been struck by lightning at a short distance from the ground. If I tried to run, over open ground, the animal would catch me instantly. All I had was my dagger. I would fight with that, and almost certainly be killed. I prayed in my deepest heart to my goddess, invoked the shadow of my father, the spirit of my mother and the dark power of Autolykos wanax of Acarnania, because I wanted to see my struggle through to the end.

  Someone surely listened to me. When I could already sense the bear’s breath close to my face, hear its claws ripping at the dry trunk, I heard the barking of a dog, soon joined by five, ten or even more, and then the growls and snarls and howls of a ferocious fight. Until everything trailed off into silence. Only the penetrating, acrid stench of the beast lingered in the air to remind me that it hadn’t been a dream. Then I fell asleep, certain that nothing would disturb me before the dawn.

  27

  WHEN I AWOKE, I SAW THAT the ground all around the oak trunk was marked by signs of a wild fight, as if not a pack of animals but a horde of demons had been at each others’ throats. I got up, slung the bow over my shoulder and fastened the quiver at my side, adjusted the oar on my other shoulder and carried on my way. I decided that from that morning on, I would count the days, and observe the stars and the rising and setting of the sun and moon in order to keep track of what direction I was moving in.

  My solitude became greater day by day and melancholy took root within me. I would have given anything, anything at all, for an hour in the company of my son or my wife, yet I avoided contact with any other human being, although I understood that if I continued thus, the prophecy would never come true. I would never meet the man who would ask me the fatal question. But I reasoned that this would force my destiny into revealing itself unmistakably. I knew that in any case the man would turn up when I least expected it, in the middle of a vast plain or on a mountain path or along the banks of a river. This is the sign. You can’t mistake it . . .

  I hunted with my bow, I set traps, I gathered roots, nuts and wild fruits. I carried a small clay jar with holes in its cover to hold the last embers from the night’s fire to keep a spark alive for the next day, so I would have light when darkness fell again. So many times, casting my gaze in all directions around me, I saw no light save my own. A solitary flicker on the dark, sleepy earth.

  As the days progressed, my body changed. Gone were the days when I’d enjoyed the favours of a goddess, food, wine and precious garments on an island at the ends of the earth. The days of feasting and the long sleepless nights of storytelling in the palace of Alcinous, the divine sovereign of the Phaeacians, those were gone too. My thin skin seemed moulded to my muscles, my sight had become much sharper, I was lighter, more agile and faster, but less powerful. More a hunter and a runner than a warrior. I’d got used to sleeping with one eye open; I would rest without slipping into unconsciousness. I’d learned that abandoning myself to sleep could have very bitter results.

  When I hunted and would have to leave my oar behind I took care to hide it well despite the fact that I was always alone. It was, after all, the last memento of my ship and my only hope of making peace with the gods.

  I often thought of Mentor – I’d lost every trace of him. Was it my goddess who had taken him, used up his body? Had she snatched his spirit as well? I long invoked her, in vain. I would have given anything to see her as I had that day in Ithaca, the day of my return, when she’d taken on the semblance of a shepherd boy and had touched my face . . . it was the only time I’d ever felt her touch.

  I forged on for more than three months, always heading east. I saw hordes of centaurs passing in the distance in clouds of dust, sighted villages with huts made of flayed animal hides. I’d even seen battle chariots that were somewhat like the ones we used. I asked myself how anyone could want to wage war on such desolate stretches of land, where there was nothing beautiful or desirable to be conquered. Only on very rare occasions did I approach small groups of men who were camped on the plains, and I was always welcomed as a guest among them, but these brief encounters only served to confirm my convictions. They were sustained by food that savages, not bread-eating people, ate; they used no fragrant herbs, they had no olives nor the shining oil that gives light in the darkness and nourishment for the body and is a balm for weary limbs. They had no cheeses, no foaming wine that cheers the heart. They ate animal fat and drank milk.

  Their women smelled like the animal skins they wore; they had no looms or spindles. Their hair was tangled and dry as straw and they didn’t bathe in waters scented with rare and precious essences. I imagined that the only time they got wet was when it rained.

  In a particularly poor village, they offered me one as a sign of their hospitality, but her nauseating smell repelled me. I accepted to take her away with me so they would not be offended, but I simply delivered her to the next village, allowing them to believe that I’d found her by chance along my way.

  Only once was I forced to fight for my life. I was venturing into a large village when I saw human skulls nailed onto a pole in the middle of a clearing and over the doors of the surrounding huts. The inhabitants must have seen me, and had perhaps interpreted the oar on my shoulder as a weapon, for although I tried to retrace my steps, their centaurs quickly caught up with me and dragged me back to the village.

  They subjected me to what must have been a sacrificial rite: I was forced to face off against a gigantic warrior. Although he was surely their champion, he used his sword like a club and not like a weapon with a cutting edge. It wasn’t difficult, on my second lunge, to run him through from front to back. The crowd who had been loudly cheering him on were struck dumb. They sent out four more men against me and I took their lives, one after another, with the sword I’d been given, an excellent bronze blade, and I wondered where it had been forged. A moment before sinking it into the chest of the fifth man, I felt a shiver under my skin an
d was filled with joy. Was Athena back at my side? I thanked her in my heart with such a surge of emotion that my eyes filled with tears. The astonished onlookers allowed me to go then, and I walked off with my oar on my shoulder.

  That same night, I found shelter in a small depression in the ground. I lay down wrapped in my cloak on a pile of leaves and fell asleep. Now and then my sleep was torn by emotions very familiar to me in the aftermath of a battle. My hand jerked to my side, searching for the hilt of a weapon. I twisted away, as if to avoid a blow. In this drowsy state I could feel sharp gusts of the north wind chilling my limbs. The wind didn’t wake me, but it wouldn’t let me sleep.

  I don’t remember when it happened, whether near dawn or in the middle of the night, but I heard Mentor’s voice, calling me. Waking me. I jolted awake and got to my feet. He was standing in front of me, looking at me with that intense expression I knew so well. It surprised me that I could see him so clearly in the dark, as if a fire or a hidden lamp was illuminating him. There was no moon in the sky and everything was dark above and below me.

  ‘Mentor!’ I cried out. ‘How did you find me in this desolation? Or are you my goddess, posing as my boyhood tutor? She’s done that before. I felt her presence today in combat, that cold shiver that tells me she’s near.’

  He replied: ‘I am not your goddess. I am the message that she sends you. Look!’ He pointed at my bed of leaves. I did look and saw myself sleeping soundly. ‘Now come with me.’ Was I moving inside a dream?

  I followed him and I realized that we were moving swiftly and covering much ground. Before us was a chain of very high mountains, their peaks capped with snow and ice.

  We stopped on one of these majestic crests. ‘This is Mount Haemos. The freezing winds that bring snow and cold over all the earth are born here.’

  ‘What will happen to my oar? I left it next to where I was resting!’

  ‘No one will touch it,’ he replied. ‘You’ll find it upon your return. You’ll need it.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon, perhaps. I can only tell you that something will happen next spring. But first you will have to cross the winter, from one side to the other: the freezing cold, the screaming wind. No one has ever survived. You passed the wall of fog: you will have to pass the wall of ice. You will be pierced by one thousand gelid swords. The cold will split your heart. Finally you will cross the last frontier.’

  ‘I want to return to Penelope, to Telemachus! I’m tired, understand? . . . immensely tired . . .’

  ‘You will see them.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When the moment comes. When you have offered sacrifice, as the Theban prophet you called up from Hades predicted.’ As he pronounced these words, the moon appeared between the wind-tattered clouds and lit up three animals on the snowy plain: they were enormous, and they were galloping across that vast expanse, raising clouds of snow, clouds of silver. A great bull with pointed horns snorted clouds of hot steam from flaring nostrils. At his side a tusked swine as huge as the boar of Calydon. On the other side, a gigantic ram, an albino with curved horns. Were they rushing towards the fatal encounter?

  Mentor’s eyes glowed bright in the dark like those of an owl that see better at night than during the day.

  ‘Calchas has just died. Can you feel him passing in the wind? Just as you had predicted, whispering into his ear. You also have the gift, remember?’

  ‘A snake bite?’

  ‘Yes, just as you had predicted. And Calchas? What did he tell you at that same instant?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. It’s too hard for me, and it wouldn’t be easy for you to hear.’

  ‘What if I showed you where Mentor is?’

  ‘Then maybe I’d tell you.’

  ‘Come, follow me.’

  He moved along the mountain ridge without leaving tracks in the blanket of snow at his feet. I left no tracks either. My body was elsewhere. We found ourselves in front of a cave.

  The ghost that guided me let off a dim light, enough for me to make out the cavern walls. I followed him through an enormous room, a petrified forest of pale pinnacles that rose from the floor and hung from the vault above, sweating tears. Some of them looked almost human, or like fabulous beasts, their jaws bristling with stony fangs. Others were joined at the middle to form columns. I’d never seen such a thing in all my life. We entered a tunnel and walked on at length. I felt fear and apprehension. My heartbeat was becoming stronger and faster with each step I took, although my heart was far away in a body sleeping in a hollow in the ground.

  The tunnel branched off several times into smaller passageways. Was the Labyrinth of Crete that imprisoned the man-bull like this? The narrow passage finally began to widen until we found ourselves in a bigger chamber with a square boulder at its centre. On this stone lay my friend Mentor, stiff and unmoving. The body that my goddess had worn to appear to me or my son, the precious friend who had always been so free with his advice and his chiding, with his help and support. A man of priceless wisdom, so generous that he could not refuse his body, his very person, to the god who loved me and had saved me time and time again.

  ‘In the end,’ said the spectre, ‘the presence of the green-eyed goddess consumed the fragile husk, and she placed him here in this majestic dwelling, an empty chrysalis, untainted and untaintable, forever.’

  I threw myself, weeping, upon that cold body, caressed his face and kissed his hands. On his chest was a small stone flower – one of those that take shape from the tears of the mountain. ‘Allow me, my friend, to wear this on my own chest in your memory. It will protect me as an amulet for as long as I live,’ I whispered. But then I shouted out: ‘If this is the cost of keeping me alive, it would have been better to share the fate of my comrades! A thousand times better to die pierced by an arrow under the walls of Troy or to sink into the abyss with my ship. My death would have quenched the blue god’s thirst for revenge and ended his loathing.’

  ‘Don’t speak thus!’ said the spirit who was guiding me. ‘You must not question the gifts and the love of a goddess!’

  ‘I am grateful for her gifts and I miss her terribly. I wish that she were here to give me hope, to tell me the place and time that I will again be able to embrace those I love.’

  ‘This may indeed happen, perhaps, when the time is right. But you and I had a pact. I’ve showed you Mentor, now you must tell me what Calchas whispered into your ear.’

  ‘I can tell you, but I’m not sure myself of what I heard.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  I couldn’t understand why my guide insisted on hearing something he should have already known, but I tried to repeat what Calchas had told me, as best I could remember it: ‘“When you have gathered your victims on the site of the agile oar, you will then have to make a choice: whether to sacrifice them and return to the sea where you will resume your reign and finally meet your death, or whether to take up your journey once again. Forever.” How I’ve struggled to interpret those words! Can you help me?’

  I had no reply save a gust of the screaming wind that brings snow and ice over the endless expanse.

  I WAS AWAKENED by the cold; my limbs felt numb. I looked all around me, above me. My oar was placed across the hole I slept in and my cloak was arranged over it like a sort of tent, held down at the hem by stones. I didn’t remember building such a shelter for myself, nor could I have done it in my sleep. The cloak began to quiver like a sail billowed by the wind and I looked beyond it, outside: it was snowing. There was no use leaving my burrow. I’d be forced to walk through the storm, with the icy sleet stinging my face.

  I stayed where I was until the snow had stopped; it was nearing dusk when I emerged. Never before had I seen the land stretch all around me in every direction all the way to the horizon. As flat as the open sea in dead calm, all the same colour of pure white snow. Remembering my father’s words in Arcadia, I plunged my hands into it. It felt as soft as the fleece of a lamb, but intensely, bitingly cold. My h
ands came out red and withered. It certainly wouldn’t have taken long to render them completely unfeeling.

  I thought of what I had seen and heard during the night. Had it truly been just a dream? It was all so clear and sharp to me, like no dream I’d ever had.

  A bit of sun had come out and the air temperature was a little warmer. The wind was still brisk and I could feel it knocking something against my chest. I put my hand to my heart and touched a small, hard object hanging from a ribbon of fabric: the little stone rose from Mentor’s chest! What message was that? What was my goddess trying to tell me? That my dream was real, dreams the only truth? Did she want to say that I had to forget the world of the living, the world I loved, the world I’d embraced when I was offered immortality instead?

  Grief soon took the place of my astonishment. I realized I was wandering through a Labyrinth with no escape, no Ariadne to provide a thread that would show me the way out.

  Calchas was dead. And me? Was I dead as well? I couldn’t have given an answer, although I was surely feeling hot and cold, hunger, pain. Perhaps I had reached the second barrier, the wall of cold and ice, after the wall of fog. I set traps around my shelter, hoping to catch myself some food.

  The next day I shook the snow off the top of my cloak, lit a fire, gathered the birds captured in my traps and ate them. Then I picked up the oar and started walking again. No trace of a human being, no matter which way I looked.

  It was then that the harshest, most painful and arduous part of my journey began. Cold and solitude enveloped me so acutely as to become unbearable. The world I’d lived in was gone; nothing but scraps of it remained in me. I felt empty and yet I continued to seek meaning in what I experienced, what I was forced to face. There had to be a reason, one that was acceptable and comprehensible to my mind.