The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  The tapestry then became his chief bond with Penelope. In order to admire it the more, he had it moved from her weaving room to their dining hall, where he could lose himself in it every mealtime. In particular he loved its second and third panels, especially that third. At his direction, Penelope willingly rewove the course of his voyage, of which in the first instance she had had no firm details: Now there were the drugged-out Lotus Eaters, the blinded Cyclops, the man-eating Laestrygonians. To be sure, Circe and Calypso were not depicted in their own persons, any more than young Phemius was shown in the loom room. But there was the Aeaean isle, the men turned into swine; there was perfumed Ogygia, with a fern-lined cave-mouth in the middle distance, and in the foreground Odysseus constructing his raft. And there was the Phaeacian shore, where an inland river meets the sea: Nausicaa of the flashing arms was now in place, playing ball with her maids and girlfriends. . . .

  The lower right-hand corner, however, Penelope had never really finished, though for display purposes she had filled the empty area; it was all background and no foreground. Given her skill, Odysseus thought, she might easily in the space available have stitched in his hike with that oar, a bit of a highland odyssey itself; perhaps even some foreshadow of his death, as Tiresias had foretold it in Hades: an easy death from the sea in his comfortable old age.

  Ted sips. In Dante’s Commedia, as Katherine mentioned, that death comes in the Southern Ocean. And so perhaps it will. But what has happened so far is this: After two years of that featureless tranquility in Ithaca, marked only by Odysseus’s absorption in that tapestry, Penelope—who seemed scarcely to have aged at all during their twenty-year separation—found that time had made up for lost time: She aged two decades in two years. Except for the distraction of reworking the tapestry and the diversion of overseeing Telemachus’s wedding (but the bride’s family did most of that), nothing much interested her any longer. She came almost to miss missing her husband. The importunings of her suitors, unwelcome as they had been, had kept her on her mettle, as had the original weaving of the tapestry.

  Most sharply, of course, she missed her friend Phemius, and wondered why she’d had no word from him whatever, not even word of his marrying and having children. By contrast with his lively youthfulness, her husband (who, if never delicate, had been similarly young and lively when he sailed for Troy) seemed now like a heavy, scarred old olive trunk. She no longer resented those long trysts of his with Circe and Calypso, which it had so wounded her at first to hear of. In his absence she had come to endow him with her lover’s better qualities as well as his own; now she found herself endowing Phemius, in his absence, with Odysseus’s better qualities, remembering the bard as stronger, braver, shrewder than he had ever been. She missed him; and while she scarcely craved him back as a lover (she could see in the glass how she’d aged; anyhow, she no longer felt up to a lover), she did not welcome her husband’s embraces and never herself took the sexual initiative with him, as she had learned to enjoy doing with Phemius.

  Nor did Odysseus, for his part, often press those embraces upon her. He truly felt that he had forgiven her her interlude with Phemius; why in the world should he not? But her revelations and Phemius’s had left their mark. Would he have been more or less bothered, he wondered, if her lover had been an Agamemnon, an Achilles? But it was your noncombatants, he decided with chagrin—it was your Parises, your Aegisthuses, your Phemiuses, in a word your doves—who laid their eggs in the eagles’ nest. In any case, while he could never dislike a woman so fitted to his soul as his Penelope, there was no longer much between them besides that tapestry, before which more and more they found themselves entranced, thinking their separate thoughts.

  Now for Penelope, who knew every stitch of that work by heart, its most attractive moments were those views in Panels Two and Three of the weaving room, herself at the loom weaving Panels One and Two respectively, their own scenes replicated in exquisite miniature. And of those, her special favorite was that tiny square in Panel Three which showed her weaving Panel Two. Even the casual viewer noticed and properly admired the little panel-within-a-panel, but there was a further detail known only to the maker and one other. In an area no larger than her fingernail (in a tapestry itself wall-size), she had managed to suggest in the tiniest stitches of the very finest thread the scenes from Panel One, being woven in Panel Two, being woven in Panel Three. That idea she had gotten from Phemius, who, as he sang of Troy, once improvised an interlude wherein an old minstrel entertains disguised Odysseus with a song of the war itself, in course of which is described the shield forged for Achilles by the gods, on which in turn is figured the story of the war thus far. Penelope herself had judged the device a touch too visible, though charming, and therefore had so buried that most artful bit in her own tapestry that no one noticed it unless she pointed it out. This she had done one mild summer night to her lover alone, who had been so delighted that he kissed her from head to foot, front and back, and improvised on the spot a naughty little song in goatherd’s Greek about some freckles on a certain part of her body, which she herself had never seen. That bit of stitchery had become the secret symbol of their connection, as the bedpost-tree had been of hers and Odysseus’s.

  As for Odysseus, it was Aeaea his eyes returned to: the hall with the swine before it and sleek Circe invisible within. The expression on her face when, so far from succumbing to her potion, he had stood erect before her and unsheathed his sword! The timbre of the voice with which she then had invited him to her bed! And even longer than upon Aeaea—seven times longer—his eyes rested upon that dusky yet dainty cave-mouth on Ogygia’s flowered shore, into which he had gone nightly for seven years and emerged fragrant with hibiscus, bougainvillea. Not just immortality had Calypso promised him, but perpetual youth, and he had—incredibly!—declined. He too could read the mirror’s message: While he credited himself with aging ruggedly, aging he certainly was; Calypso would not likely make him that offer now.

  Yet, almost to his own surprise, where his imagination lingered longest was before neither of those two beaches but a third, where a frisky young princess played at catch with her friends while a naked, weary, salt-grimed castaway watched captivated from his hiding place among the sea grapes and wild olive, wondering how to approach without frightening her away.

  When, as eventually came to pass, Odysseus announced one evening to Penelope his intention to take a bit of a sailing cruise, he politely invited her to come along. Laertes and Eurycleia were dead; Telemachus was established as manager of their estate and was bursting with new ideas he was eager to try out; Odysseus and Penelope were retired folks, really, with little responsibility. Wouldn’t she enjoy seeing something of the world beyond Ithaca? Second honeymoon, et cetera?

  As he had expected, she declined. Their new grandson, and the second grandchild on the way, meant more to her than any second honeymoon; she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving their care entirely to their mother. Anyhow, she knew without trying it that sea-voyaging would make her ill. The fact was, she had been thinking seriously of going back in earnest to her loom-work, as more than a hobby. Maybe she would open a little crafts shop. Who knew: Perhaps she would finish at last that final corner of her old tapestry. Shall we stretch our legs before Diana tells the rest of the story?

  Well, okay. The hour is late, but the night’s too muggy to make going below an inviting prospect, and we have told so many stories ourselves since Nopoint Point that it is agreeable to be told one, even at epical length. Peter checks with Katherine; she’s all right and ready for more. And we want to see and hear Diana Dmitrikakis in action. The two couples take a turn about the decks. No more liquids for Kate; Peter has had enough retsina. Ted finds cold beer below: Alpha, brewed in Athens. We reapply insect repellent against the formidable salt-marsh mosquitoes and gather again around the citronella candle aft of the mast, in the ship’s waist. Diana brushes back her hair with a copper-braceleted wrist; she frowns handsomely, like a pianist about to
strike the first notes of a recital piece; she begins

  THE LONG TRUE STORY OF ODYSSEUS’S SHORT LAST VOYAGE.

  So, she says, Odysseus and Penelope bade good-bye to each other again, and with a small picked crew of veteran sailors, he set out to westward. His official mission was to express his gratitude to the Phaeacians for having carried him home; perhaps to lay a wreath upon the rock into which, he had heard, Poseidon changed their black ship upon its return, in full view of home port. But his actual hope was to see bare-armed Nausicaa again—and beyond that he had yet another objective in mind, which he scarcely acknowledged even to himself.

  The voyage from Phaeacia to Ithaca had taken no time, for it had been accomplished as Odysseus slept, in a boat very much like this one. The voyage from Ithaca back to Phaeacia, all hands wide awake in an ordinary sailing-and-rowing vessel, was another matter, whose hazards and—I have forgotten the English for longueurs . . .

  The English for longueurs, says Peter Sagamore, is “longueurs.”

  Thank you. Whose hazards and longueurs I shall pass over. Somewhere in the course of it, Odysseus and his weary crew, laboring to windward, actually caught sight of one of those dream-dark Phaeacian boats streaking in the opposite direction, skimming the waves like a flying fish with scarcely any effort at all on the part of the crew. How they envied it!

  But after what seemed to them an age of hard wind right on the bow, alternating with slick calms, the island came into view, just as Odysseus remembered it except for a ship-shaped rock in the harbor-mouth and, behind the town, a ring of mountains that had not been there before. They landed—Odysseus as always in disguise—and made themselves known as Ithacan sailors on a trading voyage, who unfortunately had had to jettison their cargo in a storm and now sought only to rest and reprovision their vessel before moving on. Old Queen Arete received them, coolly but civilly, and accepted their captain’s gifts, including the memorial wreath and a ball of pure silver. These he declared were from their king, Odysseus, who had commissioned him to deliver them to King Alcinous and his family should their journey fetch them near Phaeacia. The wreath was to mourn those seafarers he had heard were petrified on their return voyage; the ball was for the princess Nausicaa, to replace one she’d lost in the river years ago.

  To his surprise, the queen covered her face with her black shawl like any peasant woman in mourning. For some moments she rocked back and forth in her seat—the throne of Phaeacia. Then she mustered her royal composure, uncovered her face, and told the stranger that the Phaeacians’ hospitality had indeed cost them dearly on that occasion. Not only had the flagship of the royal navy, with the finest officers and crew on the island, been turned to stone in full view of the harbor and the city been ringed on three sides with impassable mountains—Poseidon’s punishment for their ferry service on Odysseus’s behalf—but she had subsequently lost her husband and their daughter as well, and stood perhaps to lose her three unmarried sons, all on that same Odysseus’s account. The man had intended them no harm, but from the bottom of her heart she wished he had never set foot in Phaeacia.

  Nausicaa dead! cried shocked Odysseus. And great Alcinous too! He begged Arete to tell him the story before she withdrew, so that he could relay it to King Odysseus, who would be heartbroken to hear how the gods had repaid the Phaeacians’ generosity. I should hope so, said Arete, and later that afternoon obliged him with the unhappy details. Princess Nausicaa was not in fact known to be dead, she said; however, she might well be worse than dead. Always previously a model daughter, though a strong-willed one as befit her mother’s child, she had not been the same after Odysseus’s departure. Day after day she paced the shingle down where the river meets the sea. She would have nothing to do with the eligible young gentlemen of Phaeacia, whose attentions, whatever she might say to the contrary, had pleased her enough before. Incessantly with her maids she did the royal laundry, as if by that magic she could once again conjure briny Odysseus from the olive bushes. To their shame, Arete and Alcinous had indulged this folly, even encouraged it, without really meaning to do so. For to them as well, after Odysseus’s departure, the local young men seemed second-rate; they found themselves wishing for another like him—younger perhaps, unmarried certainly—to be their son-in-law. But Poseidon’s revenge had sharply reduced their interisland commerce; few strangers called on the court of Phaeacia these days.

  As Nausicaa’s lovesickness had grown, she had hounded blind Demodocus to leave off singing of Ares and Aphrodite and the moon and stars and sing only the Trojan War, specifically the episodes starring her hero. Indeed, she had pestered the old bard to make up an entirely new song based upon the grand tale Odysseus had told them of his long voyage homeward, which had fetched him to Phaeacia. Arete even feared that the girl had driven the poor fellow into early retirement, for he was too gone in years to attempt another epical composition. She was possessed, Nausicaa was, and no amount of reminding her of Odysseus’s age and marital status could unpossess her.

  Both to appease their daughter and in hopes of weaning her from her passion, when Demodocus had hung up his lyre not long since, the king and queen had replaced him with a younger bard who had lately become the rage of the Mediterranean, chiefly on the strength of his Odyssean songs. The stipulations of their contract with this Homer—that was the young virtuoso’s name—were that he would sing of the wandering Ithacan as often as the princess demanded, but that always the song must end with the joyful reunion of devoted husband and faithful wife. The bard had readily agreed: That general topic was his specialty already, and inasmuch as his version was at particular pains to emphasize Penelope’s fidelity, Odysseus’s steadfast longing to return to her, and their triumphant reunion, the stipulations were no burden.

  But by no fault of Homer’s, Arete explained, the stratagem had backfired. Happy ending or not, the song so emiamed Nausicaa’s craving for that man old enough to be her father, she would have young Homer repeat and repeat the beach scene, wherein the salt-stenched castaway flings himself at her white knees. Then she would flee the room before the bard began the second half of his work, which, depending on his and his audience’s mood, took him from two to twelve more evenings to get through, and which to tell the truth was less interesting to the Phaeacians than the first half—especially Books Six through Twelve, with their local setting.

  Not many months ago, said grim-faced Arete, a night came when Nausicaa fled at that familiar moment not only from this room but from the palace and evidently from the island, presumably in search of the hero of her fancy, since none of us has seen or heard from her since. When it became apparent that she was nowhere in the city or the surrounding countryside, her three unmarried brothers put to sea for Ithaca in search of her. But my husband so feared that she had fallen into the hands of pirates, and so blamed himself for having offered her hand to Odysseus in the first place, he suffered a stroke soon after her disappearance, and a few days later died. I carry on in his stead as best I can, managing our simple affairs of state, receiving the rare visitors to our island. You and your shipmates shall enjoy our customary courtesy, short of ferry service. You are to make yourselves comfortable and remain in Phaeacia for as long as necessary to repair and reprovision your ship. However, you must excuse me from the evening’s entertainment. I have no quarrel with good Homer’s art; indeed, I hope against hope that his Odysseus-song may somehow sing my daughter home again. But I cannot abide hearing of its hero.

  You can imagine with what emotion Odysseus heard all this. But he kept his own counsel and maintained his incognito, declaring to Queen Arete only that King Odysseus would be grief-stricken to learn that his innocent and helpless stay in Phaeacia had had such lamentable consequences. He then paid formal tribute to the stone ship, sacrificing to Poseidon down at the harbor; the wreath he laid on the grave of Alcinous. He even made a courtesy call on old blind Demodocus, who echoed in more professional terms Arete’s praise of his successor. All artists, the bard declared to his v
isitor, have their tricks and specialties. Among this young Homer’s was a gift of singing so artfully of women that Demodocus had been moved to ask him whether, like the prophet Tiresias, he had not once been a woman himself. Homer’s answer had been that he was not nor had he ever been a woman; he was only a man who had learned to listen to women, and who, when he had had eyes to see with, knew how to look at them as well, and to understand and remember what he saw.

  I see, said Odysseus: Like yourself, then, this Homer is blind?

  Quite blind, Demodocus replied. And to me alone he has entrusted the story of how he became so. As you may know, my friend, there are tales that we bards sing to the public at large, and other tales that we sing only to one another.

  Had Demodocus himself been sighted, he would have seen Odysseus’s eyes narrow then as he said Though I am no bard myself, sir, I pray you tell me that story. I shall pay you any fee you name. Replied Demodocus I will not do it for any price; not even for my life.

  Tell me then, Odysseus said to Demodocus: Do you or this Homer chap know anything of Princess Nausicaa’s whereabouts? Queen Arete has been so courteous to me despite her grief that I am determined to discover her daughter’s fate. Or is that perhaps another of those tales sung only by one bard to another? If it is, Demodocus answered, then my gifted young colleague has not seen fit to sing it to me. There is yet a third category of songs, he added: those a bard sings only to himself. But I suspect that Homer knows no more than you and I of Nausicaa’s whereabouts. How beautifully he sings of her!