The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  What Poseidon had chastized the Phaeacians for, Nausicaa explained, was their former unfailing generosity to castaways on their island; their ferrying them home gratis like a magic water-taxi service, while they slept. He would not punish her brothers, for example, for flying from port to Mediterranean port in search of her; nor would he likely punish a Phaeacian couple for embarking together upon a voyage of exploration. Their rights in such matters seemed clear enough. Now: Her brother’s boat was a new design embodying the very state of the art of Phaeacian naval architecture, a field in which her people were unrivaled. It was as much swifter than all previous Phaeacian designs as those were swifter than anyone else’s. Furthermore, while her brothers were justly regarded as the winningest racing skippers in Phaeacia and therefore in the known world, the truth was that when she and they had been children, racing their sailing prams about the harbor, she used to beat them two times out of three. And even though the customs of the country judged it unsuitable for well-born young women to go to sea, more than once at her urging they had smuggled her aboard with them, dressed as a man, to advise them in a particularly important race; and her tactical skill never failed to fetch whatever boat they were sailing across the finish line first.

  You astonish me, said happy Odysseus.

  Yet what neither I nor my brothers have, Nausicaa went on, we being strictly racing sailors, is exactly what you have aplenty: experience in navigating through such cruising hazards as Lotus Eaters and cannibals, and survival skills like raft-building and jury-rigging. In short, she concluded, if he were to renounce his Ithacan citizenship and become one of them, and were he and she to ask her brothers, upon their return, for the loan of their marvelous vessel, and were they to put it at her disposal, and were she and he to set out to westward in it with no other crew than themselves and the lightest possible cargo, to minimize displacement—then, by Zeus, she believed that while they might fail nevertheless to attain that magical escape-velocity, they would have the best chance of attaining it that any mortals ever had, and they should at least approach that timeless shore more closely than mortals ever did.

  She lowered her eyes. But maybe you’re not prepared to become one of us.

  Odysseus rose to one stiffening knee before her and would have taken both her hands this time had she not needed one to hold her tunic over her breasts. In the presence of this great bard, he declared, I here renounce all past citizenships, loyalties, and identities. I declare my wish to become one of you and to pursue exactly the course you have just proposed. You’ve given up so much for me, Nausicaa, that being Ithacan is the least I can give up for you. I do it freely and readily.

  Homer’s accompaniment grew restless. One of you, the man says, he told his lyre, and that’s the least he can give up for her. If I had eyes, I’d look just now to Nausicaa’s and would see there something less than joy. But look here, Odysseus: Why should Nausicaa’s brothers put their pride and joy at your disposal, the fastest boat in the fastest navy in the world? They wouldn’t be just lending it, you know, the way a friend or relative might lend his dearest possession. If your stunt works, they’ll see neither their sister nor their boat again. What you’re asking for is another outright gift, like Nausicaa’s love, and one almost as extraordinary.

  Odysseus had to admit that the bard was right. Even his poor sluggish Ithacan boat, in which he’d made only one voyage and that an uncomfortable one, it would pain him to part company with. The loss of its predecessor, which had carried him faithfully from Ithaca to Troy and as far homeward as Scylla and Charybdis before it went down into the whirlpool with all hands but himself, had broken his heart almost as much as the loss of his comrades. He had no right to expect Arete’s sons to donate their prize possession to a virtual stranger.

  He sat again on the goatskin rug, altogether dejected. Nausicaa tapped her fingers on her cheekbone. Your wits, man, Homer urged, and then sang again, with different emphasis: I wish to become one of you; that is the least I can give up for you. Hey nonny nonny and aiyiyi . . .

  Odysseus clapped his brow. Good Homer! Great Homer! Again I owe you! He rerose to one knee and clasped both of Nausicaa’s, which were bare and pressed together. Splendid woman, he said to her: more patient and forbearing than almost anyone I know: My wits are so dulled by age and fatigue that if we do not soon find a way to turn time back, I’ll be too addle-headed to navigate at all. How could I have spoken of giving up the least for you instead of the most, or of becoming one of you instead of one with you? Forgive me all that: Let’s marry our fates and fortunes, you and I, and find out not how much we can give up for each other but how much we can have together!

  Homer struck a more satisfied chord and set down his instrument. That took a while, he said. Now then, pretty Nausicaa: You came to me freely, as did another noble lady once before, without seductive designs or blandishments on my part, and you made me the most satisfied of men for the second time in my life. For that, my thanks. My only regret is that this time around I never saw the details of my good fortune, except in my mind’s eye, and it’s in the details that reality abides. Caress the details, old Demodocus used to sing to his apprentices, and he’s right. Even so, in what I’ve heard tonight there is the stuff of a second Odyssey, or maybe a Nausicaad, which I’m so eager to begin working out that you must not only consider yourself released from all obligation to me—you never had any, really—but also excuse me now, the pair of you, from your company.

  Good Homer, Nausicaa murmured, not taking her eyes from Odysseus’s face. It seemed to her that already he was looking younger, more like the man she had fallen in love with when he had washed the salt off himself that morning on the beach and her maids had decked him out in one of her brothers’ robes.

  Great Homer, Odysseus echoed. If it was the bard’s pleasure, he declared, his men would give him free passage back to Ithaca, where he could reinstall himself in the palace and sing his new song as well as the old one and any others in his repertory. For just as there are those who quickly tire of anything familiar and forever hunger for novelty, so there are others who believe the old songs to be the best.

  I believe I understand your invitation, Homer replied, and I promise to consider it seriously.

  In return, declared Odysseus, I hope you’ll let Nausicaa and me be your guests here till tomorrow morning. Then we shall go down to Queen Arete and tell her a tale that will do honor to both yourself and this young woman. After that, when her brothers come home, she and I will marry. They’ll give us their boat as a wedding gift to get me out of their way, and we’ll set out for the setting sun.

  The tale you’ll tell Arete is a tale I’d like to hear, said Homer, but not tonight. Very well, my house is yours: not in return for your Ithacan invitation, which I may after all end up declining with thanks, but in return for Nausicaa’s past favors, which I am not likely ever to forget. And now, friends, I’ll say good night—as soon as I’ve heard Nausicaa accept, after the fact, the proposal she accepted in advance.

  Nausicaa declared she did, and Odysseus kissed her for the first time at last, somewhat clumsily on account of their positions, the bard’s presence, and her continuing modesty with respect to her tunic. Homer withdrew with his lyre to the farthest corner of the little cabin, where for some while he sang and played to himself to give the couple what privacy was possible in the circumstances. Impatient to get on with it, Odysseus nevertheless restrained himself at the princess’s bidding until presently, as Nausicaa had reason to expect he might, the bard fell asleep over his composing. Even good Homer, she declared, sometimes sleeps. Finally then she took her friend’s hands in both of hers, stood up as straight and brave as she had stood once upon the beach, let the tunic fall, and herself initiated what she had dreamed about awake and asleep ever since her friend Eleni had missed that momentous catch.

  There was one awkward moment only: When at Odysseus’s delighted bidding she turned so that he could admire at leisure what he’d only g
limpsed on first entering the cabin, she was mortified to hear suppressed laughter, and shocked to see that the man was in fact grinning, not merely with ravishment! Her eyes stung; she spun about, snatched up her tunic from the floor. Her own opinion, confirmed by Eleni and her other girlfriends and more recently by Homer himself, was that her backside was as perfectly perfect as the rest of her. It is, it is! Odysseus hastened to assure her: A flawless marvel! A pearl! A peach! But so long had she sat upon those manuscript pages in that chair while this story unfolded to its present moment, those splendid buttocks were now befreckled with the ink of Homer’s Odyssey. Life had imitated art: The poet’s description of her charms was no longer poetic license. But those freckles, declared Odysseus, darling as they are, belong elsewhere than on white-limbed, blemishless Nausicaa. Forgive me my amusement, dear friend, and permit me to remove them.

  He made to do so, with a corner of her tunic. But bold Nausicaa, her composure regained, let that garment fall again, and, leading him to the bed, ordered him, as penance for having embarrassed her, to remove those literary blemishes with kisses. And so he rapturously did, until of inky freckles on the royal hey-nonny-no there remained not one iota.

  Now great Athene in her wisdom, as if to compensate for having made epically long Odysseus’s first night home with Penelope, made this first night with young Nausicaa lyrically short. Her protege was after all a decade older than Homer; his staying power was no longer something to sing about. All the same, when presently the lovers fell asleep in each other’s arms—Odysseus much sooner than Nausicaa—both were content. He had made love to a number of women in his half-century, but never to one so fresh, lovely, and eager, despite her inexperience, as the clean-limbed princess of Phaeacia, at once dainty, athletic, and without inhibition once that matter of the freckles had been clarified. As for Nausicaa, in bed with the second man of her life: If she had been in the mood for objective comparison, she would have found young Homer the more imaginative and longer-winded performer. But she was in no such mood. In the dark with Homer, she had been more blind than he, every night pretending it was Odysseus who embraced her and turned her this way and that. Now it so excited her that her long love-dream had come literally true, she insisted the lamp be left lit so that she could see Odysseus seeing her body and taking his pleasure in it. Well after he had satisfied himself for the present and fallen sound asleep, she continued to touch him, feasting her eyes upon his hard-used, muscled flesh, the famous scar along his inner thigh, and those parts which, on the beach, he had kept covered by that olive branch.

  In the morning, Odysseus made breakfast for the three of them. When the princess and the poet were awake enough to pay attention, he briskly set forth the general outline of the story he proposed to tell Arete, and with their help—especially Homer’s, whom not surprisingly they found to be a gold mine of invention—worked out its details. So impressed were the couple with the bard’s contributions, they prevailed upon him to carry the tale himself to Arete and try its effect before they presented themselves and apprised her of their plans. Truth to tell, Homer was not displeased to oblige them, for while he was in his turn impressed by Odysseus’s inventiveness—so ready and fertile that the poet began to wonder how many of those adventures recounted to the Phaeacians in Books Nine through Twelve of the Odyssey had actually occurred—as a professional, he found the man’s delivery somewhat wanting.

  The lovers then disguised themselves as goatherds and followed the bard down the mountain with a few of the flock Homer kept about the cabin in honor of his former occupation. While still in the Phaeacian suburbs, they heard that the palace was in an uproar: Nausicaa’s brothers had returned during the night from their fruitless search. At once Homer suggested a detour to the cottage of his senior colleague, Demodocus, who always heard every rumor first and had the best nose on the island for sniffing out fact from fiction.

  Arriving at the old man’s house, they heard him singing of, of all people, Telemachus. From the doorway, Homer struck a single chord; Demodocus at once put down his own lyre and welcomed him by name, as respectfully as if Homer were the emeritus minstrel and himself the newcomer. Between you and me, Homer said after greeting him, let never a false note be struck. The couple with me are Captain Odysseus, formerly of Ithaca, and his lover, formerly mine, the Princess Nausicaa. We three have made peace among ourselves; we mean to do likewise with Queen Arete and her sons. But we’ve come to you first, both to pay our respects and to hear from you what’s what down in the palace before we go there.

  The surprised old minstrel bade the lovers come closer and speak certain dialogue lines from Book Six of Homer’s Odysseus-poem, so that he could verify their identity. He had suspected, he declared, that his Ithacan caller might be Odysseus come back for Nausicaa, but had dismissed that suspicion as too dramatically interesting to be true: an occupational hazard of bards, he said, to whom reality’s unrestrained melodramatizing is a continual embarrassment. Though he regretted Alcinous’s death, he found it highly amusing that all the while Nausicaa’s brothers were turning the known world upside down in search of her, she was in bed with worthy Homer up in the hills. He could not imagine a finer literary prize, he declared, or a more deserving winner; for once, “poetic justice” had turned out to mean justice for a poet. And he was prepared to sing them the palace news, if Homer in turn would sing him Odysseus’s alibi for Nausicaa and himself.

  With pleasure, Homer said, glad of the chance to try out their story on a world-class colleague before performing it in court. You first: You were doing Telemachus, I believe, when we interrupted you.

  Following Homer’s example, Odysseus and Nausicaa sat on the floor at Demodocus’s feet, exchanging warm glances and touches while the old man retuned his lyre and sang that Nausicaa’s brothers and their crew of handpicked oarsmen had expected to sail their new vessel to Ithaca as one might step from one room into the next, but that in fact, to their disappointment and mystification, the voyage had taken above a week: nowhere near so long as an ordinary ship would require, but far longer than their design specifications predicted. Be that as may, they had been hospitably received by Odysseus’s wife and son and daughter-in-law, the master of the house being not at home. Taking Prince Telemachus aside to spare Queen Penelope’s feelings, the young men had told him all about their sister’s infatuation with his father, which had so possessed her that she had disappeared altogether from the city, presumably to seek him out. In return for the Phaeacians’ having once returned Odysseus to Ithaca at very considerable cost to themselves, the brothers begged Telemachus to beg his parents not to take offense at Nausicaa’s unrequited and embarrassing passion, should she somehow make her way to that high hall, but to pity it for the madness it was and see to it that the princess was safely returned to her family.

  I feel just awful, Nausicaa said. Odysseus squeezed her hand.

  Prince Telemachus readily agreed, sang Demodocus, but then much alarmed the three brothers by reporting to them that his estimable parents were alas no longer together: They had seen fit to go their separate ways, his mother back to her loom, his father back to seafaring. That Odysseus had in fact set out some time ago for the brothers’ home port, ostensibly to pay tribute to the Phaeacians’ ill-rewarded hospitality to him. It might be, Telemachus speculated, that Princess Nausicaa’s regrettable passion was not unrequited after all.

  This news, Demodocus.sang on, had aroused mixed emotions indeed in the brothers, who were additionally chagrined that to get back home in their defective new boat would take another full week. In fact, however, they and their crew retraced their course in a mere eyeblink of time, and realized that their outbound problem had been not in their autopilot, but in themselves. The older Phaeacian vessels had been able to intuit where their skippers wished to go and to steer them unerringly there; their new, state-of-the-art design did likewise, but so much more sensitively that in certain circumstances it could be at odds with itself. The brothers’ direction
had been, in effect, Take us to Ithaca, to where our sister and Odysseus are; the autopilot knew where Ithaca was, but must also have sensed that neither Nausicaa nor Odysseus was there. It had subtracted the second directive from the first, at great cost of headway.

  This vindication of their yacht-designing skills, however, was a pleasure much muted by their discovery, only last night, that Odysseus had indeed arrived in Phaeacia just after they had left it; that he had been their mother’s guest, incognito, throughout their absence; and that having heard from Arete the story of Nausicaa’s disappearance and from Homer the story of the Odyssey, he had himself disappeared earlier that same evening—for some reason chasing after the famous bard, who for some reason strenuously eluded him. The sibling princes were now reorganizing and arming their crew as a posse to go up into the mountains in search of Homer’s cabin, though they could have little hope of stumbling upon what no one else had ever found, and like all Phaeacians they were terrified of any altitude above sea level. And that, Demodocus concluded, is the morning’s news.

  He’s right about our fear of heights, Nausicaa told Odysseus, although masthead height would be more accurate than sea level. It took more nerve for me to follow Homer up that path than it did to stand and face you in Book Six. We Phaeacians call it acrophobia.

  We poets, Demodocus rejoined, call it poetic license when we say “sea level” instead of “masthead height.”

  And the gods, wry Homer said, call it poetic justice, I suppose, to punish a race of sailors with a ring of mountains. It was the local acrophobia I counted on to keep my fans from following me home and learning who my roommate was. Only another Ithacan like myself could be equally at ease on the wine-dark sea and in the goat-delighting hills. Last night, exactly such a one came along (here Homer took up his lyre, struck a chord, shrugged), and my honeymoon was over. Now it’s back to my nimble-shanked goats and my hexameters, which I hope may be as nimble. Tell me what you think of this bit of theater, Demodocus.