Lavinia

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  He nodded.

  "But later on—you said he went down to the underworld, and talked to the shadows of the dead there—later on. Did he meet his wife again there?"

  The poet was silent, and then said, "No."

  "He couldn't find her among so many," I said, trying to imagine the dead.

  "He didn't look for her."

  "I don't understand."

  "Neither do I. And I doubt that I'll know any more when I get there. We each have to endure our own afterlife ... He had lost her. In the fire, in the slaughter, in the streets. Lost her forever. He couldn't look back. He had his people to look after."

  After a time I asked, "Where did they go after they escaped from Troy?"

  "They wandered a long time around the Middle Sea, not knowing where to go, getting it wrong. They came to Sicily and stayed a while. His father died there. They set off again to seek the promised land, but a storm scattered the fleet and threw the ships onto a wild coast in Africa."

  "And what did they do there?"

  "Thanked the gods for safe deliverance, and got themselves some venison, and feasted. And then Aeneas and his friend Achates went off to find out what country they were in, and came to a city that was just being built. Carthage it was called, and the people were Phoenicians, and the queen was Dido. And she welcomed them."

  "Tell me about it."

  The poet seemed hesitant. I felt at once that his hesitation had something to do with the queen.

  "He fell in love with Queen Dido," I said, and felt a curious flatness or disappointment as I said it.

  "She fell in love with him," the poet said. His voice was grave. "I think this is not really a story to be told to a young girl, Lavinia."

  "But I am not a young girl. I am 'ripe now for a man, of full age now for marriage.' As you said ... And I am aware that mar ried women sometimes fall in love with other men. Younger men." I doubt he heard the dryness in my voice when I said that. He was thinking about the African queen.

  "She was a widow. There was nothing wrong about it. Except that her heart and her will ran away with her. She very much needed a king. She was an excellent ruler, her people loved her; they were founding a beautiful city there, everything going very well; but it's a rare thing for a woman to rule long alone. It makes men uncomfortable. The neighboring kings and chiefs were after her. Courting her, coveting her power, wooing and threatening at the same time. Aeneas came as her savior, her answer to them—a tried warrior, with his own troops—a man born to be a king, but with no country of his own. She needed him before she loved him. She fell in love with his son, first. She took to Ascanius at once, held him and hugged him and promised him good times, and of course the motherless boy liked her, the warmhearted, beautiful, kind, childless woman. And that went to Aeneas' heart. His son was all the family he had left. He promised to help Dido get her city started. And so..."

  A pause.

  "One thing led to another," I said.

  "I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them."

  I had no idea what a cynic was but I knew what he meant. "I wasn't speaking in contempt. One thing does lead to another. There's no harm in that. How else would husbands and wives ever come to love each other? She needed a man. And he was kind and noble and handsome and shipwrecked. She fell in love with him. Any woman would."

  "Let it be an omen," the poet murmured.

  "But did he fall in love with her?"

  "Yes. He did. She was beautiful, fiery, passionate. Any man would. But..."

  "He was still mourning for Creusa."

  "No. His wife, his city, that was all behind him. Far back. Years and lands and seas between them. He didn't look back. But he didn't know how to look forward. He was caught in the moment, in the present time. His father's death was a hard blow to him. He had depended on Anchises, obeyed him even when the old man led them astray. When he died and took the past with him, Aeneas felt the future was gone too. He didn't know how to go on. The storm that scattered his fleet and took them off course, to lands they didn't know—there was a storm like that in his soul. He'd lost his way."

  "What was his way?"

  "Here. To Italy. To Latium. He knew that."

  "Why couldn't his future have been in Africa? Why shouldn't he stay and help the queen build her city and be happy with her?" I spoke reasonably, though in fact I did not want him to have done that. I counted on the poet's argument.

  But he didn't argue. He shook his head. After a while he said, pursuing his thought, "It was a storm that brought them together, too. While they were out hunting. They got separated from the rest of the hunting party. There was rain, hail, they took refuge in a cave. And so..."

  "Did they marry?" I asked after a while.

  "Dido took their love for marriage, called it marriage. He did not. He was right."

  "Why?"

  "Not even need and love can defeat fate, Lavinia. Aeneas' gift is to know his fate, what he must do, and do it. In spite of need. In spite of love."

  "So what did he do?"

  "He left her."

  "He ran away?"

  "He ran away."

  "What did she do?"

  "She killed herself."

  I had not expected that. I thought she would send out ships after Aeneas, pursue him, take fiery revenge. I could not like this African queen but I could not possibly despise her. Yet suicide seemed a coward's answer to betrayal. At last I said so.

  "You do not know what despair is," the poet said gently. "May you never know."

  I accepted that. I knew what despair was. It was where my mother lived after her sons died. But I had not lived there myself.

  "It was a hard death," he said. "Her sword went wide of the heart, and the wound killed her only slowly. She told them to light the pyre she lay on before she was dead. He saw the great fire of it from out at sea."

  "And knew what it was?"

  "No. Maybe."

  "His soul must cringe in him every time he thinks of that. Weren't his people ashamed of him?"

  "Even if he'd called himself king there, it would never have been their country. And Dido had stopped building the city, dropped the reins of government. She'd lost her self-respect, she couldn't think of anything but him. Things weren't going right. They were glad to get him away from there." After a time he said, "He did see Dido, down in the underworld. She turned away. She refused to speak to him."

  That seemed only right. But there was an awful sadness in the story, an awful shame and sorrow, an unbearable injustice. I felt so sorry for all three of them, Creusa, Dido, Aeneas, that I could not say anything. We sat a long time in silence.

  "Tell me of happier things," the poet said in his beautiful, gentle voice. "How do you spend your days?"

  "You know how the daughter of a house spends her days."

  "Yes, I do. I had an older sister, in Mantua. But this is not Mantua, and our father wasn't a king..." He waited; I said nothing. He said, "On feast days the chief men of the city come to dine at the king's table, and visitors from other cities of Latium, and perhaps allies from farther away—and your suitors, of course. Tell me about them."

  I sat for a while in the darkness. The rain had passed over and stars were beginning to shine overhead and through the leaves of the forest around us. "I come here to get away from them. I don't want to talk about them, please."

  "Not even Turnus? Isn't he very handsome, very brave?"

  "Yes."

  "Not handsome and brave enough to move a girl's heart?"

  "Ask my mother," I said.

  At that he was silent. When he spoke again he had changed his tone. "Who are your friends, then, Lavinia?"

  "Silvia. Maruna. Some of the other girls. Some of the old women."

  "Silvia who has a pet stag?"

  "Yes. We saw it down this way, Maruna and I. It was following a doe, just like a dog after a bitch. A dog with antlers. It made
us laugh."

  "Males in love are ridiculous," he said. "They can't help it."

  "How do you know about Silvia's stag?"

  "It came to me."

  "You know everything, don't you?"

  "No. I know very little. And what I thought I knew of you—what little I thought of at all—was stupid, conventional, unimagined. I thought you were a blonde!...But you can't have two love stories in an epic. Where would the battles fit? In any case, how could one possibly end a story with a marriage?"

  "It does seem more like a beginning than an end," I said.

  We both brooded.

  "It's all wrong," he said. "I will tell them to burn it."

  Whatever he meant, I did not like the sound of it. "And then look back from out at sea and see the great pyre flaming?" I said.

  He gave his short laugh. "You have a cruel streak, Lavinia."

  "I don't think so. Maybe I wish I did. Maybe I'll need to be cruel."

  "No. No. Cruelty is for the weak."

  "Oh, not only the weak. Isn't a master stronger than the slave he beats? Wasn't Aeneas cruel in leaving Dido? But she was the weak one."

  He stood up, a tall shadow in the dimness. He paced back and forth a little. He said: "In the underworld, Aeneas met an old friend, the Trojan prince Deiphobos. Paris, who ran off with Helen, was killed in the war. So the Trojans gave Helen to his brother Deiphobos."

  "Why didn't they put her out the gate and tell her to go back to her husband?"

  "The Trojan women asked that question; but the Trojan men didn't hear it ... So, then, the Greeks took the city, and Menelaus came looking for his wife, the woman they fought the war for. And Helen met him. She took her old husband to the bedroom where her new husband was sound asleep. He hadn't heard the sounds of battle. She hadn't wakened him. She'd stolen his sword. So he woke to his death, the Greek stabbing him, hacking him, chopping off his hands, slicing his face in half, crazy for blood, and the woman looking on. And so Deiphobos went down into the dark. Down there, years after, Aeneas saw him, his shadow, still maimed, mutilated, unhealed. They talked a little, but the guide broke in—no time for this, Aeneas must hurry on. And the murdered man said, 'Go on, go, my glory. I am gone. I join the crowd, return to darkness. I hope you find a better fate.' And speaking, he turned away."

  I sat in silence. I wanted to cry, but had no tears.

  "I will be gone soon," the poet said. "I will join the crowd, return to darkness."

  "Not yet—"

  "Keep me here. Keep me here, Lavinia. Tell me it is better to be alive, better to be a slave living than Achilles dead. Tell me I can finish my work!"

  "If you never finish it, it will never end," I said, speaking only to speak, saying what came into my head, to give him some comfort. "Anyway, how are you going to end it, if not with a marriage? With a murder? Do you have to decide how it ends before you get to the end?"

  "No," he said. "I don't, in fact. It's not exactly a matter of deciding. Rather of finding out. Or, as it now stands, of giving up, because I haven't the strength to go on. That's the trouble. I am weak. So the end will be cruel." He paced back and forth once, between me and the altar. I could hear no sound of his steps on the earth. But finally he sighed, a long, rather noisy sigh, and sat down again, his arms round his knees. "Tell me what you and Silvia do, what you talk about. Tell me about her deer. Tell me how you make the salt. Tell me when you spin, when you weave. Did your mother teach you those arts? Tell me how you unlock and clean out the storeroom early in summer, and leave it open for a few days, praying to the Penates that it be refilled with the harvest..."

  "You know it all."

  "No. Only you can tell me."

  So I told him what he asked, and comforted him with what he knew.

  I spent the next day alone in the forest of Albunea. The air was heavy under the trees, and the sulfur smell stopped my breath when I went near the springs. Wandering away, I found a path up the steep hill, almost a crag, that rises up over the forest. Clearings at the top gave a wide view west to the bright line that was the sea. I sat up there in the sunlight in the thin grass, my back against a fallen log. I had my spindle and a bag of wool; a woman usually carries some of her Penates with her. I was spinning the very finest thread for a summer toga or palla, so my light bag of wool would last me a good while. I sat and spun and thought and gazed out over the hills and woods of Latium, all green with May. At midday I ate a little cheese and spelt bread and found a spring to drink from. There were shepherds' lettuce and watercress growing at the spring, and I ate that, too, though I had intended to be very sparing, even perhaps to fast; but fasting comes hard to me. Then I explored the hilltop a little more, and when the sun was halfway between high heaven and earth I made my way down into the depths of the woods again. I passed the stinking springs on the windward side and came again to the altar place. There I slept a little, for I had had little sleep the night before. When I woke, in the dusk, big white moths were fluttering in the air within the sacred wall, rising and falling, circling round about one another in an airy maze, wonderful to see. I watched them sleepily, and through their dance I saw my poet standing near the altar.

  "The moths look like souls in the underworld," I said, still only half awake.

  He said, "It is a terrible place. On the far side of the dark river are marshy plains, where you hear crying—little, weak, wailing cries, from the ground, everywhere, underfoot. They are the souls of babies who died at birth or in the cradle, died before they lived. They lie there on the mud, in the reeds, in the dark, wailing. And no one comes."

  I was awake now. I said, "How do you know that?"

  "I was there."

  "You were in the underworld? With Aeneas?"

  "Who else would I be with?" he said. He looked about uncertainly. His voice was low and dull. He went on, hesitant, "It was the Sybil who guided Aeneas ... What man did I guide? I met him in a wood, like this. A dark wood, in the middle of the road. I came up from down there to meet him, to show him the way ... But when was that? Oh, this dying is a hard business, Lavinia. I am very tired. I can't think straight any more."

  "You're not thinking straight about the babies," I said. "Why would they be punished for not having lived? How could their souls be there before they had time to grow souls? Are the souls of dead kittens there, and of the lambs we sacrifice, and of miscarried fetuses? If not them, then why babies? If you invented that marsh full of miserable dead crying babies, it was a misinvention. It was wrong."

  I was extremely angry. I used the second most powerful word I know, wrong, nefas, against the order of things, unspeakable, unsacred. There will be many words for it, but that was the one I knew. It is only the shadow, the opposite, the undoing, of the great wordfas, the right, what one must do.

  He sat down, doubling up his tall shadowy figure, and I could see how wearily he moved, how he bowed his head down like a man spent, defeated; but I would not have pity on him.

  "If cruelty comes of weakness, as you said, then you are very weak," I said.

  He did not answer.

  After a long time I said, "I think you are strong." My lips and voice quivered as I spoke, for I did pity him, though I did not want to, and my heart was full of tears.

  "If it is wrong, I will take it out of the poem, child," he said. "If I am permitted to."

  I wanted so much to be able to help him, to give him a fleece to sit on or my own toga to put round his shoulders, for he sat hunched as if he was shivering cold. But I could do nothing for him, and could touch him only with my voice.

  "Who is it that permits or forbids you?"

  "The gods. My fate. My friends. Augustus."

  I knew what he meant by his fate and his friends. At least I knew what the words meant. The others I was not certain of. And I did not know who his friends were and whether he could trust them. As for his fate, we none of us know that.

  "But surely you're a free man," I said at last. "Your work is your own."

  "I
t was till I got sick," he said. "Then I began to lose my hold on it, and now I think I've lost it. They'll publish it unfinished. I can't stop them. And I haven't got the strength to finish it. It ends with a murder, as you said. Turnus' death. Why does it? Who cares about Turnus? The world is full of fine fearless young men eager to kill and be killed. There'll always be enough of them for every war."

  "Who kills him?"

  The poet did not answer my question. He only said after a long time, "It's not the right ending."

  "Tell me the right ending."

  Again he was silent for a long time. "I can't," he said.

  It was almost dark. Leaves and branches that had stood out sharp black against deep blue had begun to blur away into the dimness of night. Venus shone for a minute low between dark tree trunks in the west, and I prayed to the power of its beauty. There was no wind at all, and no bird or creature made any noise.

  "I think I know why I came to you, Lavinia. I have wondered—Of all the people of my poem, why were you the one who called my spirit? Why not my great, my dear Aeneas? Why can't I see him with my living eyes as I saw him so often with the eyes of my art?"

  His voice was extremely low, almost breathless. I strained to listen. I did not understand much of what he said, then.

  "Because I did see him. And not you. You're almost nothing in my poem, almost nobody. An unkept promise. No mending that now, no filling your name with life, as I filled Dido's. But it's there, that life ungiven, there, in you. So now, at the end, when it's too late, you have it to give to me. My life. My earth of Italy, my hope of Rome, my hope."

  There was a desperation in his voice that wrung my heart. His words died away and he sat still, his head bowed. I could barely see him.

  I was afraid, knowing that he was drifting away from me into his sadness, his mortal sickness. I was afraid I would lose even his shadow. I wanted to keep him with me. Though I did not and could not understand it as he did, I knew what the bond between us was, and how to use it to bring him back.