The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Odysseus declared that rather than wait for the evening’s performance, he would speak privately with this Homer at once. Where did he live? Alone, said Demodocus, high up in the new mountains behind the city, like a solitary goatherd. He, Demodocus, did not know the way there, nor had any of Homer’s numerous admirers been able to follow him home at night after one of his performances; for though blind, he was nimble as a mountain goat.

  By now Odysseus had strong suspicions of this Homer’s identity; that same evening they were confirmed. So long had it been since a trading ship had called on Phaeacia, despite her mourning Queen Arete treated her visitors to the first of what turned out to be a week-long series of state dinners. After the entrée, as a dessert of sweet butter cookies called koulourakia was being served, she excused herself from table but bade the company remain to hear the fastest-rising star in the firmament of minstrelsy, the famous Homer.

  Two serving-boys led him in, one guiding him by the elbow, the other carrying his lyre. Odysseus’s shipmates, who had scarcely known the bard Phemius in Ithaca, did not see through the prematurely white hair, the gaunt and weathered face with its closed blind eyes; but Odysseus recognized at once the man he had assaulted in the Ithacan hills for singing lewdly of his wife. Despite Arete’s testimonials, he put his hand upon his sword-hilt and prepared to strike, should “Homer’s” song so much as hint at Penelope’s affair with her minstrel.

  Diana smiles. Ted and I believe that a genius is not a person dramatically different from ordinary people. He is a man or woman much like others, but more finely honed, to the point where his difference in degree becomes almost a difference in kind. Homer took up his lyre like any other bard; he sipped red wine unmixed with water; and he sang the dignified and touching first four books of The Odyssey: Athene’s visit to encourage Telemachus; that young man’s debate with his mother’s suitors; his embassy to Nestor in sandy Pylos, in quest of news of his father; his calling on Menelaus and Helen in Sparta upon the same errand. Familiar topics, every one—but sung with a discernment, an economy, a pungency of detail, and an artfulness of arrangement that made them seem as if seen and sung for the first time and forever. That is what genius is, in Ted’s and my opinion.

  Moved to the marrow, Odysseus applauded more loudly than anyone in the hall. When Phemius then bowed, drained his wine cup, and left the room without assistance, he hurried after to question him privately about Nausicaa. But at the sound of pursuing footsteps, the bard broke into a nimble run, darting like a rabbit this way and that once he was clear of the palace and outside in the forecourt. Though Odysseus snatched up a lantern from a drowsy guard to keep him in sight, he soon lost his sightless quarry in the dark.

  The same thing happened on the second night, after Homer had sung the beautiful story of Calypso; of Odysseus’s near-drowning and his beach encounter with Nausicaa of the flashing arms; of his reception by Arete and Alcinous in that very hall; of the Phaeacian games; and of the bard Demodocus’s singing first of jealous Hephaestus’s snare for the lovers Ares and Aphrodite, then of Odysseus’s great stratagem of the wooden horse. What a bard this Phemius had become! Hearing him sing how Demodocus’s song had moved disguised Odysseus to helpless tears, disguised Odysseus was very nearly moved to helpless tears.

  Says Peter Sagamore Bravo, Dee. And Bravo says cool Diana cried the Phaeacians, who had crowded the hall to hear themselves so sung. Now: Enraptured though he was, Odysseus believed that in Homer’s description of Calypso’s beauty he detected some details of Penelope as she had been rendered in Phemius’s sex-song to the goats of Ithaca. But so well-imaged were they, and so forgivable, he could not take offense: Homer had after all never seen Calypso, and the nymph thus described was sleeping with Odysseus, not with the bard. In Homer’s rendition of Nausicaa, on the other hand (except for yet another repetition of the freckle motif), there was a clearly firsthand accuracy and authority: so much that Odysseus found it difficult to believe that the bard had never seen the princess with his own eyes, and had been in her presence for only the short period from his arrival upon the island until her disappearance. Once again he pressed after the singer to question him, but in the crowd Homer eluded him even more easily than he had done the night before.

  So it went also on the third night, after Homer sang Books Nine through Twelve, Odysseus’s rehearsal of his story thus far; and again on the fourth night, and the fifth, the sixth, the seventh. As the audience thinned out, Odysseus was able to pursue his quarry a bit farther each evening: out of the forecourt, through the town and the dark suburbs, up into the steepening hills. But invariably, blind Homer slipped away in the black high mountains behind the city. Moreover, he arrived at and left the palace by a different path each evening, so that even when Odysseus stationed crewmen along his first six routes, his seventh turned out to be different from all its forerunners. Yet Odysseus dared not collar the fellow in mid-performance or for that matter in the hall itself, for fear of offending good Arete, revealing himself prematurely—and cutting off the marvelous story.

  He approached the eighth and final evening with trepidation. In the ongoing story, Odysseus had landed in Ithaca and moved in with Eumaeus the swineherd; Telemachus had returned from Pylos and Sparta and been reunited with his father; disguised Odysseus had entered his own house as a beggar, had been insulted even by the other beggars, had gone unrecognized by his wife but not by his old nurse Eurycleia, and had suffered with his son the taunts of Penelope’s suitors while he reconnoitered the situation and made his murderous plans. Tonight must bring the climactic massacre and the delicate business of his reunion with Penelope. Once again Odysseus stationed his men along Homer’s seven previous escape routes; once again the bard appeared as if from nowhere after the quince compote, and Queen Arete excused herself, announcing somewhat pointedly by the way that after this final state dinner, her guests were free to entertain themselves as they pleased. And once again Odysseus sat hand on buckler through the bard’s performance.

  What a performance it was! Though the audience after the first four nights had steadily dwindled, the hall was packed for Homer’s conclusion of his Odyssey. Unable to curb their enthusiasm till the end, the crowd applauded separately Odysseus’s drawing of the great bow, his slaughter of the suitors, his sparing of the bard Phemius (which Homer made a comic scene of, so mimicking the frightened bard’s plea that Arete’s hall resounded with laughter). Then he sang the meeting of husband and wife: Penelope’s confusion, Telemachus’s chiding her, Odysseus’s admiring patience, the riddle of the marriage bed—all with such discretion and insight that despite himself Odysseus wept aloud, just as he had done years before at that same table when Demodocus sang of Troy.

  The blind minstrel paused in his conclusion of the story. As before, the Phaeacians asked their guest of honor why he was so overcome—particularly since, as an Ithacan himself and loyal to Odysseus, he ought to be gratified by the story’s happy ending. It was the first time he had been thus publicly singled out; the bard quickly made to leave the hall. Odysseus bolted from his chair and called across the room: Phemius, wait! It is Odysseus himself who has pursued you these seven nights, but I intend you no harm! I wish only to praise your art—and to ask a few questions about Princess Nausicaa!

  Everyone was astonished. But unmasked Homer did not wait to hear his art praised; in his usual zigzag fashion he dashed from the hall, out of the palace, and through the forecourt, easily eluding the men positioned to intercept him. He headed for the hills by an utterly different way, more difficult and dark than any of the others. Odysseus had after him like hound after hare—at first despairingly, not only because he had never yet been able to follow very far, but also because this time he was himself blinded, by his own tears, and in his haste he had left behind the lantern he used to follow the slippery bard’s trail.

  Before long, however, he came to realize that these handicaps were an asset. Unable to see, he was obliged to listen, and in order to hear he had
to move quietly as well as quickly. He no longer called after his quarry, thereby announcing his own whereabouts. Once out of the town and up in the craggy hills, he no longer raced, but stalked. As the incline steepened, he sprang from rock to rock; even leaped crevasses in the dark. When he heard Phemius pause to listen, he paused too, and moved only when Phemius moved—until, after more than an hour, the bard, no doubt believing himself once again free of his pursuer, carried on more leisurely and less cautiously. Indeed, once he’d gotten his breath back he began to sing, and the work of following him up the high black trails became easier yet.

  His song, which Odysseus could hear plainly, was about how wrathful Odysseus had gouged out the bard Phemius’s eyes for his having sung the beauty of his mistress, Odysseus’s own Penelope—in particular the freckles on her hey-nonny-no, pretty freckles on her hey-nonny-no. Odysseus drew his sword. But the song was neither a taunt nor a lament: In its next verses the bard thanked his assailant, who in thus blinding him had done him unwittingly a triple service. Sighted (he sang in the following stanza), he would have seen fair Penelope grow old and lose her beauty; he would have seen younger, fairer women and would have sung their beauty instead of hers. But as it was, Penelope’s former beauty remained the last his eyes would ever know; she was ageless in his imagination; he would sing forever the freckles on her hey-nonny-no, dainty freckles on her hey-nonny-no. Furthermore (the next stanza declared in a sober Phrygian minor mode), his blindness, like Demodocus’s, had enabled him to see the world more clearly. Despite Odysseus’s threats, it had made him Homer the epic bard instead of Phemius the ribald minstrel, that mere singer of freckles on hey-nonny-nos, sweet freckles on hey-nonny-nos. No sighted Phemius could have composed blind Homer’s Odyssey, which would make both its hero and its composer immortal. Nevertheless—and here the song grew gay again—in the singer’s inmost self, behind Homer’s blind eyes, horny Phemius still pranced and capered: Odysseus’s third favor was to have made him into a Homer so admired that Princess Nausicaa herself had run away from home to become his mistress! What was more, as fate and poetry would have it, she was the very image of youthful Penelope, right down to the freckles on her hey-nonny-no—hi ho! Twenty freckles on her hey-nonny-no!

  That was a song, however, his song concluded in a flippant coda, to be sung only to the singer by himself.

  By turns moved, chagrined, outraged, dismayed, and astonished, Odysseus at the song’s end found himself really mainly curious. He put away his sword as Homer rounded a final rocky corner and hove into sight of a small lamplit cabin in a level clearing. That light, in a blind man’s cabin, made Odysseus’s skin tingle. Sure enough: Forth came a white-armed young woman with a cup of wine to greet the returning bard. From the concealing darkness, Odysseus marveled: She was the same tall, trim-limbed beauty he remembered from the beach, only a few years older, more womanly than girlish now, and if anything lovelier than he remembered. Her black hair was let down; it spilled about her face and shoulders as she handed rough Homer the wine cup. Shocking, to see the former goatherd’s helper so familiar with a princess! Homer guzzled the wine, then drew her face to his for a kiss. It did not escape Odysseus’s eye—he seemed to see things this evening more sharply than ever before—that Nausicaa turned her cheek to take the kiss. But when Homer then good-humoredly smacked her behind and led her into the cabin, she put her arm about his waist and made no protest.

  Having heard what he had heard and then seen what he had seen, Odysseus was after all inclined to leave the couple in peace. Clearly the princess was there of her own choosing; the affair was not finally his business. But having come so far, he could not resist drawing nearer, to use his eyes and ears together. Through a shuttered window he saw Homer seated on a low chair, drinking more wine. Nausicaa, sitting cross-legged on a clean black goatskin on the floor with a goosefeather in her hand and some sort of parchment on her lap, asked him whether he had been pursued from the palace yet again that night. He had, replied Homer, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and now that he knew by whom, he would be obliged to stay up in the hills for a while. In fact, popular as he was in Phaeacia, he and she must consider moving to some other city. I’m ready, Nausicaa said at once. But who is it pursues you?

  Her voice, breaks in Theodoros Dmitrikakis: Don’t forget to tell what the sound of her voice does to Odysseus.

  Diana touches her companion’s muscled leg. Katherine Sherritt bets she can guess what the sound of Diana Dmitrikakis’s voice is doing to Peter Sagamore; it’s even doing it to her. She touches his leg; her husband squeezes her forearm reassuringly.

  Odysseus is in love with the sound of Nausicaa’s voice, Diana says simply. Never mind, said Homer: It’s only a hostile critic from the old country; every bard has his share of them. He had no fear of the fellow, he declared to her, especially now that she had copied out his Odyssey in her writing. Even if his pursuer should catch and kill him, he would live on in those written verses. It was for Nausicaa’s sake that he had given the fellow the slip night after night, not to betray her hiding place. For that, Nausicaa said, stroking the goathair indifferently with her feather, she thanked him, she supposed. Homer stood, drained his wine cup, and supposed she could thank him in their bed just as well as from where she sat. Later, maybe, the princess replied, and Odysseus’s heart stirred: No doubt Homer was tired from his evening’s performance and his flight from his pursuer; he should turn in and sleep. But she was restless from having done nothing the day long but copy out his endless Odyssey, the final book of which she had still to review for errors of transcription. She guessed she would sit up and copy-read until she grew sleepy.

  You may sit up and read copy all night, said Homer cheerfully, just as you please. He knew very well what copy she’d be reading, he declared: not Book Twenty-four, but old Book Six, wherein bare-arsed Odysseus breaks up her ball game. But first she must come soothe her singer to sleep with the freckles on her hey-nonny-no, et cetera. You are one-third poet and two-thirds goat, Nausicaa chided him: you and your hey-nonny-nos. But she dutifully put down her vellum and rose to join him in his low bed—whereupon Odysseus, unable either to withdraw or to stand quietly by, burst into the cabin, calling her name.

  Startled Homer sprang upright in the bed, his tunic open, his phallus fast descending. Nausicaa of the flashing arms had already dropped her tunic to the rug, atop her manuscript; now with a squeal she snatched it up to cover herself, sending papers flying—but not before Odysseus with his newly sharpened senses had observed that her buttocks were as unfreckled as her famous arms. Don’t be alarmed, he wanted to tell her: It is your friend Odysseus. But he could only repeat her name.

  Nausicaa looked, looked again, covered her face with a corner of the tunic, and collapsed into the nearby chair, upon several manuscript pages that had fallen there. She looked yet again, closed her eyes, and let her head fall back. It really is you, she said. What in the world are you doing here?

  He has come all the way from Ithaca to butcher me, Homer answered, quite in control of himself now. He believes that I have broken a certain vow I made to him years ago, when he poked my eyes out in the Ithacan hills. In this belief he is mistaken—not that that fact ever stayed the hand of an epic hero. But Homer does not beg for his life, Odysseus, the way twice-craven Phemius did. He asks only that you preserve the tale that this young woman has copied out, who gives herself to me for no other reason than her adoration of you. My Odyssey does you the honor you have heard already; it is, in fact, your scribbled immortality.

  The bard’s self-possession returned his own to Odysseus. Great Homer, he said, placing his hands upon the fellow’s shoulders to show him that his sword was sheathed: Be assured that I will injure neither it nor her nor you. I have heard the songs you sing to the world, the songs you sing to Demodocus, and the songs you sing only to yourself. The first I honor; the second I forgive; the third I will not betray. For having blinded you in my blindness, I ask your pardon.

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sp; Forgiven, forgiven, Homer said. That little business made my day no brighter, but in making my night it made my life. He perched on the bed edge, crossed his legs, and asked How are things in Ithaca? Odysseus replied that Penelope was well and thought often of her old friend Phemius, lamenting that she had heard nothing from him. That her great tapestry was done at last, but that, himself being no poet, he would not presume to describe its finishing touch, the lower right-hand corner of the Homecoming panel. Homer must return to that high hall himself one day, to her weaving room, where he would always be welcome; he must hear from Penelope’s own mouth, feel with his own skillful fingers, what ending she has brought that story to. As for the lady herself, Odysseus swore gallantly that she remained in every particular exactly as Homer remembered her from the days when he was her friend and comforter Phemius.

  Mm hm, said Homer. As for himself, Odysseus went on, he remained that excellent woman’s great admirer, her steadfast friend, and her lifelong provider; but they were no longer truly husband and wife. At this news, Nausicaa—who had been dabbing at her eyes with her tunic sleeve and listening amazed—grew still and redoubled her attention. He had installed his son Telemachus, his daughter-in-law, and their children in his high hall, Odysseus declared, speaking now directly to her. Their life was Penelope’s life, unless and until she should see fit to take another husband or another friend—and that lucky fellow had Odysseus’s blessing in advance.

  Nausicaa found something of her voice and asked What about you? Smiling Odysseus sat down on the goatskin rug between her chair and the bed. Nausicaa tucked up her legs and drew the tunic more carefully around herself. He had thought at first to retrace the route of his odyssey in reverse, Odysseus said: beginning in Phaeacia, then calling upon Calypso and Circe, perhaps even sailing back to Troy, to see how their postwar reconstruction was proceeding; thence home again to Ithaca by the route he first sailed therefrom. Now, however, he understood that rocky Ithaca was home to him no longer; his black ship was, and the wine-dark breast of the sea. Not impossibly he might one day revisit there, to see how his grandchildren grew; but it would be simply one more port of call. His destination was undecided—though he had a certain plan in mind. But now, Princess, he said, it is your turn to answer questions. Are you here altogether of your free will, as it appears to me?