The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Applauds Kathy Hear hear, and we drink to those things. We Sherritt-Sagamores, some of us anyhow, are beginning to feel our wine.

  And you are about to have a child, adds Diana. A fourth great thing.

  Says Peter Or fifth or sixth. There’s twins at least in there, named Iliad and Odyssey. He raises his glass. May you be likewise blessed, if that’s a blessing you seek. May you be oppositely blessed, if it isn’t. We drink. Declares Kate We’ve enjoyed this evening, too. We think that Theodoros is handsome and Diana is beautiful, and that this here now Phaeacian Thirty-five is the fleetest, swartest ship that ever clove the wine-dark, fish-infested sea, is what we think.

  We drink. Ted says good-humoredly You make a little joke about the boat, but we don’t mind. On the contrary: Dee and I will tell you two stories to add to your story collection, if you wish to have them. Two of those follow-up stories you speak of. But these you have never heard before. What do you say?

  Kate says she’s all ears and so’s Pete, and says it so they’ll know she means it. Peter adds that we began this little cruise with more cause than purpose, if they know what he means—sailing from more than sailing to—but the thing seems to be becoming a sort of narrative scavenger hunt. By all means tell on; we’re honored and delighted.

  Satisfied Ted declares that the second of these twin stories is the true story of Odysseus’s so-called last voyage. The first has to do with that famous web of Penelope’s, the last corner of which she wove by day and unraveled by night for more than three years to stall the suitors, having promised them she would choose a new husband from their number when it was done. The story has to do with what she wove into that last corner: what the web was about.

  On with that story, urges Peter Sagamore.

  Says Ted I shall tell one and Diana the other. Which is your pleasure, my dear?

  The second, of course. In fact—Diana rises, smooths out her white tunic; Peter’s hormones exclaim By Aphrodite, she is a magnificent specimen!—I’ll clean up dinner while you tell the first.

  She won’t permit us to help. But all four of us need to pee before further narration, and so at last we Sagamores get a real glimpse belowdecks. A showboat, a gold-plater: gorgeous woods, meticulous joinery—inlays, even, and intricate hand-carving everywhere. The galley fixtures and the plumbing in the head compartment are modern, but our not-inexperienced glance espies no electronics, no navigation station—just as there were abovedecks no engine controls or instrumentation that we could see. To be sure, they could all be concealed for effect behind that handsome woodwork.

  Bladders relieved and legs stretched, three-fourths of us return to the main deck and at Diana’s request move our chairs close enough to the aft companionway for her to overhear the story. Katherine Sherritt props her legs up comfortably on the quarterdeck rise. Peter Sagamore pours out three dollops of retsina, one of mineral, and hands a glass down to gleaming Dee. Theodoros Dmitrikakis takes a sip and a breath, and with an assurance in this case pleasing, begins by glass-candle-light

  THE UNFINISHED STORY OF PENELOPE’S UNFINISHED WEB.

  After Odysseus had drawn the great bow and slain the suitors and caused the wanton maidservants to be strung up all on the same rope like hapless sparrows in a fowler’s snare, and after Penelope, as Katherine says, had overcome her doubts by means of the marriage-bed secret, husband and wife so long separated retired at last to that very bed. As you recall, Athene made that first night of their reunion long, holding back the dawn to give them time both to make love and to hear out each other’s stories.

  But although Homer doesn’t mention it, their second night together was even longer, for in its course, after making love, they raised and answered a question much upon their minds. It was Penelope who voiced it, as they lay now lightly separated in the great bed Odysseus had fashioned for them, their hands touching in the dark. Granted that each of them had been essentially faithful over all those years: Whatever his trials, temptations, perhaps even lapses, Odysseus had come home to her; nor had he ever doubted her to be his destination. And whatever hers, Penelope on her part had never really ceased to believe that he would return, and had not committed herself to any other; and here they were, back in each other’s arms. Yet it could scarcely be imagined that both had remained strictly celibate for twenty prime and mortal years! Leaving aside as unworthy of mention any fleeting, inconsequential alliances—a slave girl or temple prostitute here, perhaps an itinerant princeling there—what, if any, had been their major side-engagements of the heart? Whom else had each of them loved—though never so much, Q.E.D., as they loved each other? Between two so fit to each other’s souls as they, such stories might be told.

  Odysseus spoke first, and, though all guile with others, to Penelope as to Athene he spoke straight truth. As his canny wife supposed, there had indeed been one such “side-engagement of his heart”: not with any mortal woman—what mortal woman could hold a candle to his Penelope?—but with a goddess, as dangerous as she was beautiful. Tell the story, Penelope directed, and tell it whole and plainly. I fear nothing, now that we are together.

  So Odysseus told her the story of his liaison with Circe the enchantress on the island of Aeaea, to which he came with his one surviving ship and crew after those ruinous adventures with the Cicones, the Lotus Eaters, Polyphemus the Cyclops, Aeolus on his floating island, and the cannibal giant Laestrygonians. Everybody has heard that it was this Circe’s pleasure to turn men into beasts, and that she turned Odysseus’s scouting party into swine. The common story is that she did this by means of a certain charmed potion slipped into their wine, against which the herb Moly alone was proof. But the truth is that that potion was Circe’s unusually keen intelligence and formidable learning, in the presence of which—combined as they were with her striking beauty and her excellent and plentiful wine—men turned themselves into whatever beasts lurked inside them: some into lions, some into wolves, others foxes, others dogs. In the case of that particular party, swine.

  Touché! cheers Katherine Sherritt, and asks if that’s what Circe’s potion was, what was the Moly?

  Says Ted That was Penelope’s very question, to which Odysseus answered The Moly was my experience of you, who alone besides Athene have always seen through my every pretense and pretension. As I see through this one, Penelope replied. Don’t flatter me: There was more to that Moly than myself. Responded Odysseus I speak the truth, but so do you: There was indeed more to the Moly. Its deep root, I say again, was my experience of you, which taught me how to love unpatronizingly a woman my equal in authority and intelligence. The difference is that Circe was not my equal but my superior, with whom I had always to be at my very best, once I had disarmed her with that Moly and she had taken me to her high bed. Not for a moment, in the year I spent with her—

  A year! Penelope cried out, and let go her husband’s hand and sat up in the dark bed. You stayed with this enchantress a whole year?

  This night, Odysseus reminded her, we’re honor-bound to tell the truth. Not for a moment in that whole year did I dare relax my guard and simply be myself with Circe, or I’d have joined the other swine in her pen.

  A whole year! Penelope lamented. She lay down again beside her husband, but did not take his hand as before.

  He could not have managed longer, he told her, so unremittingly upon his mettle did the enchantress keep him. What was more, he needed not only to preserve himself from being turned into ham and bacon, so to speak, but somehow to rescue and restore his crew from that condition, and moreover to extract from Circe the sailing directions to Ithaca from Aeaea, which is off the charts: A place where East and West mean nothing, Homer says. It is a route that carries one straight through Hades, past the fateful Sirens and the Wandering Rocks, and then—at cost of ship and shipmates—between Scylla and Charybdis to Ogygia, the enchanted island of Calypso.

  Penelope could only whisper once again A whole year!

  The most demanding year of my life
, declared her husband: so exhausting that I lost track of time altogether, and had to be reminded by my men what season it was. In the end I got everything I wanted from her; but I swear to you that beside that year with Circe, my ten years of fighting before the walls of Troy were child’s play, and my seven years with the nymph Calypso were a vacation.

  Says grinning Peter Sagamore Uh-oh.

  Your seven with the nymph Calypso! cried Penelope, sitting upright. Tell me you mean seven hours! Seven days!

  Ssh, Odysseus bade her: You’ll waken old Eurycleia. Will you hear the truth, or hear nothing? Oh, the truth, Penelope wept; we shall have the whole truth. With this other other woman, then, it was seven whole years!

  Odysseus implored her to calm herself, declaring that he expected equal candor from her in her turn, when her turn came. Penelope told him to proceed, but her head was dizzy, and she would not lie down beside him while he continued. Seven years!

  I understand your distress, Odysseus assured her, Ted said. What you must understand is that whereas with Circe I was free to leave as soon as my men were restored to me and I had my sailing directions, with Calypso I was in effect a prisoner, though a splendidly treated one. I had no men, no ship, no choice but to put myself at the nymph’s disposal and to do her bidding in her perfumed cave.

  Penelope steeled herself and asked what had been this Calypso’s bidding, exactly. Just what I needed after Circe, replied Odysseus, next to being here in this unmoving bed with you. Where are you going? Penelope answered from across the room that she would hear the rest of his story from the chair at the foot of their bed. And hear the story she would; but he must understand that such news required some assimilating. On with it.

  Odysseus himself sat up now and said frankly through the darkness between them that after the extraordinary challenge of his year with Circe, and the heartbreaking loss of every ship and crewman he’d set out from home with, it was an unspeakable relief that the immortal and beautiful nymph Calypso expected of him nothing but that he be a ready fellow. Theirs was a relation without responsibility, except amorous performance.

  Katherine Sherritt bets that news cheered Penelope right up.

  Don’t forget the woman’s strength of character, bids Theodoros. Stricken as she was, she did understand the situation as her husband described it. Did you give her children? she wanted to know then, or she you, as I gave you Telemachus? He had not, Odysseus replied, for Calypso had wanted none. It is said that the embrace of a god is never fruitless, but goddesses have their ways; they get children by mortal men only when they choose to. And fortunate it was for him she was disinclined, for a man who sires children upon a goddess is typically a wreck thereafter: Look at old Peleus, Achilles’ father by the nymph Thetis; look at old Anchises, Aeneas’s father by Aphrodite. As for where his heart lay, Odysseus went on, Calypso herself would testify that though at her bidding he went to her high bed for two thousand five hundred nights and there did his manly office without stint or respite, every morning he returned to the seashore, there to bewail his idyllic isolation and rack his brains for a way to get home to his mortal wife.

  Eight years with other women! Penelope repeated like a refrain, but more quietly than before. A year with Circe, seven with Calypso! You were out there actually sailing for only one year of the nine!

  Odysseus firmly begged her to remember in her distress that, unforgettable as those two women and those twin interludes were, they were but interludes. Moreover, with Circe he had been in danger and in need, and with Calypso, though not at risk, he had been powerless to leave without her consent and assistance. Bear in mind also, he appealed to her, that both affairs, being as they were with goddesses, did Penelope a kind of honor, as did the fact that while both Circe and Calypso had admittedly engaged her husband’s heart, neither had captured it. But now, he said, it is your turn to be the teller and mine to be the told. Will you not rejoin me in our bed?

  You made our bed, Penelope said quietly, and now you must lie in it, alone, till I’ve told my tale. And tell it I will, though at less length. For one thing, there is less to tell. For another, I am still short of breath before the fact that you and I have spent fewer nights together in this bed than you spent in the high bed of Calypso.

  Yet you have, after all, a tale to tell? Odysseus asked uneasily.

  I have, his wife affirmed. No god, she declared, came down from Olympus to interrupt her loom-work with irresistible importunings, nor did any wandering Aeneas make her his Dido-of-a-season. She did not, like Spartan Helen, run off with some royal houseguest, nor like Clytemnestra install a noncombatant noble in her warring husband’s bed—though among her one hundred eight late suitors had been numbered many a handsome lord. What’s more, they had pled their several suits not adulterously, like Aegisthus, but on the honorable and reasonable presumption of Odysseus’s death—for they had been as ignorant as she that he was neither dead in Troy nor sunk and drowned, but sleeping one year with Circe, seven with Calypso. Yet to none of them had she lent her heart, nor had she gone to any’s bed even for an hour, much less admit him to this moveless bed of theirs.

  Thoughtful Odysseus said Mm hm. No god or demigod, you say; no wandering hero or well-born suitor . . .

  Dear husband, Penelope said: Word has perhaps reached you of the device by which for above three years I forestalled my suitors’ pressure to choose a husband from among them. I mean the loom trick.

  Odysseus acknowledged that news had come to the hut of Eumaeus the swineherd, who subsequently passed it to him, that the impatient suitors at one point had agreed to let her finish weaving a shroud for Odysseus’s old father before she chose a second husband, and that for three years she had unwoven every night what she wove by day, until the ruse was discovered and she was obliged to finish the piece. But everybody knows that a tale recounted is likely to be a tale improved. Tell on.

  What he heard was essentially correct, Penelope told him, but it was not the whole story. She had indeed begun a shroud for old Laertes at one point to delay the suitors, and had been obliged to finish it when they discovered how slowly she was proceeding. But that was a trifle: a work of her left hand, so to speak. Her major web-work for the past nineteen years, and the source of the unweaving-device, was quite another matter; it is that one which both tells and is her story. She began it soon after Odysseus sailed for Troy, to keep her mind and hands busy in his absence. It was to be a sampler of sorts, into which she meant to work little reminiscences of their too-brief time together. She had fully expected him to return victorious before it was complete. As the years passed, however, it grew into a mighty tapestry, in three panels.

  The first panel, on which she worked no less than seven years (Penelope’s voice failed her for a moment when she spoke that number), depicts the story of their life together from their courtship in Sparta through Odysseus’s departure on that ill-starred military expedition to Troy: a period three years shorter than the time it took to weave it. There is bandy-legged, thigh-scarred young Odysseus, a suitor himself then, winning her hand in the Spartan footrace. There are the bride and groom leaving her homeland in their honeymoon chariot, Penelope modestly veiling her face to indicate that her first loyalty is now to her husband. Even the intricate lacework of the veil is duplicated in the tapestry—weaving about weaving, so to speak, of which the then-novice weaver was particularly proud. There is Odysseus building their palace and fashioning the newlyweds’ marriage bed. There is Penelope giving birth to Telemachus in that same bed the very next year; and, but one year thereafter—woven in darker thread—there is Odysseus feigning madness in order to dodge the fateful draft. He yokes together an ox and an ass to plow his Ithacan fields; he sows the furrows with salt. But Agamemnon and Menelaus, the recruitment team, neither believe him mad nor recognize the sane prophecy in his behavior: that it is they who are mad, for mounting a war which will leave their fields and wives barren. There is the counterprophet Palamedes proving Odysseus’s sani
ty by snatching infant Telemachus from Penelope’s breast and setting him in the tenth furrow, which the father will not plow lest he kill his son. There is that other draft-dodger, Achilles, hiding among the women until Odysseus, now recruited, tricks out his sex. There is the fleet’s false first start from Aulis; and there—in the panel’s last, lower right-hand corner—the second: In red thread is stitched the blood of sacrificed Iphigenia; the whole catalogue of Argive ships sails Troyward into the background, while in the foreground of the final square inches, in lieu of artist’s signature, the tiny figure of Penelope, her son in her arms, her back to the viewer, stands alone on an Ithacan headland, staring out to sea.

  Why, that sounds epical! Odysseus ventured. I much look forward to seeing this tapestry of yours.

  Penelope did not reply. The second panel, she declared presently, turned out to be another seven years in the loom. Seven years! And it would never have been embarked upon, had she not believed from year to year of those seven that, despite certain prophesies to the contrary, her husband’s triumphal homecoming would interrupt it. There are tales, my friends, that one begins in hopes of never having to reach the end.

  In two views, this panel recounts the ten years of the Trojan War. The first view (occupying only the upper left-hand corner) shows their house, steadfast and unchanged. Her father-in-law Laertes, the old nurse Eurycleia, the dog Argos, the swineherd Eumaeus, the goatherd Melanthius, the herald Medon, the bard Phemius (who of course was too young then to be a bona fide bard yet)—all go about their domestic business. . . .

  Phemius, Odysseus mused. That will be the young fellow who begged for his life when I was killing your suitors the day before yesterday. I was about to dispatch him with the others when Telemachus confirmed the fellow’s story that he had never sung for the suitors of his own free will. I spared him and sent him packing.

  From across the room he could hear Penelope’s breathing. When you sailed, she said presently, this Phemius was a boy, one of the goatherd’s helpers. But early on he showed such a way with the lyre and with his voice, amusing the servants so with his clever songs, that Eurycleia set him the task of keeping up my spirits with his music as I wove.