Memoirs of a Bitch

by Francesca Petrizzo

  I followed the young novice, Cassandra’s favorite, down a covered corridor and up a flight of stairs. Cassandra’s room was at the top. Aricia went in without knocking, then stepped aside to let me pass. Cassandra was sitting cross-legged on the bed, examining the contents of a bowl of metal beads.

  “Come in, Helen,” she said without looking up; I laid my shawl on the table and sat down at the head of the bed.

  “You can stay if you like, Aricia,” she added encouragingly, but, blushing under her fringe of yellow hair, the girl responded with a terrified stammer.

  “I … no, thank you … you’re too kind … I …” Tripping over her own feet, she fled so that the rest of her mumbled and broken words were lost on the far side of the heavy wooden door.

  Looking up, Cassandra smiled. “An adorable girl,” she said, “though maybe brought on a little too quickly. She’s in love with me; I hope she gets over it soon. When she was still capable of normal conversation it was a pleasure to be with her.”

  I smiled too. “Of course she’ll get over it. After all, you’re her teacher …”

  “And sister and confidante. Her family wanted to keep her dowry, I suppose.” Her tone was light, but there was a profound bitterness in her sharp features. Putting aside the bowl of beads, she went over to the mirror. With her back to me she grasped the table with both hands and breathed deeply once, twice, thrice. Her knuckles turned white and her wrists stiffened. I said nothing; in the world of her anger, Cassandra was on her own. I looked absentmindedly out of the window; beyond the barred shutters the world was screaming a protest at the brutality of the storm. Still absentminded, I reached for the bowl on the bed and shook it so that the beads sang.

  “Aeneas brought me those,” explained Cassandra, suddenly turning with a smile on her pursed lips. She nervously pushed back her hair. “They made a sortie on horseback beyond Ida. Carrying yet another fruitless message, I expect. He bought these beads on the shores of Colchis. For me.”

  She sat down on the bed again, taking the bowl in her hands and turning it three times. Metal hissed against metal like a serpent. Then, her dark eyes nearly black, she turned the bowl one more time as if waiting for something. Perhaps for words in some language I could not understand. I looked away uneasily. “That was a nice thought.”

  There was something in the sudden blossoming of Cassandra’s smile, in her irrational swing from one mood to another, that suggested the madness they attributed to her. Now she answered in a dreamy voice: “The future’s simply in the bowl. Better than frothing and shaking, I suppose.”

  She was as tough as Hector, and there were no nuances for her.

  “The future?”

  She nodded. “The nomads foretell the future with iron beads. I imagine my usual prophetic fits would knock them off their horses.” She smiled again; it might have been a joke, but the beads were still turning in the bowl, and as I watched they formed an indistinct spiral, a chain of gray light.

  “Ask,” murmured Cassandra.

  So I asked my question of gods whose voices I did not know; the bowl tilted and the gray chain was broken. Beads fell from the bed like solid drops of water, bouncing on the beaten earth floor and rolling away between the legs of the chair. Cassandra watched them for a moment, then began murmuring in a low voice, her lips scarcely moving and her eyes far away. Finally she murmured, “Ten,” and tightened her fingers slightly on the edge of the bowl.

  I felt blood drain from my cheeks and hide in distant corners of my body as if my heart had stopped beating. For a long moment Cassandra went on concentrating in silence; then turned to me again. She reached for my hand; her own was surprisingly warm.

  “It is a long time for a war, you’re right.” I could feel veins of marble down my back and looked at her, knowing she would be smiling.

  “What …?”

  “Don’t ask questions when you don’t want to hear the answers, Helen from Sparta,” she said briskly, springing nimbly from the bed to pick up the fallen beads.

  “Ten,” she said again. “And one already gone.” One bead slipped from her fingers and rolled against the door jamb. She left it and turned toward me with the bowl still in her hands.

  It was silly to be afraid of a bowl of iron beads, but my skin was unused to the cold and my throat was dry. “Put them away.”

  Cassandra nodded indulgently, and bowl and beads disappeared into an engraved wooden box on the table. The uncertain light of the lamp captured the soft glow of an amber necklace.

  “Was that a present from Aeneas too?” My tongue was running away with me, and I felt I must pay a price for my fear. But Cassandra was not disconcerted.

  “Aeneas son of Anchises has often brought me presents. And I have accepted them whenever possible.” I could not read her expression; her eyes as she sat beside me were fixed on empty space and her hands were around her knees. She rocked herself gently.

  “Yes, it is as you think, Helen,” she added slowly, her voice far away, “but I haven’t betrayed the dumb cruel god of these walls. The love of mortals is a small thing; though it can warm you, even at a distance.”

  Suddenly I remembered my first day in Troy; the hands of Aeneas on Cassandra’s wrists, removing her with gentle force, and the endless military maneuvers of Hector through the streets, Aeneas behind him with a dark shadow under his eyes.

  An ant slowly began crossing the floor as though it had all the time in the world. And perhaps it did, since it could not know that it must die.

  “He was happier once, even though he knew the day must come when the doors would close behind me. He used to smile, did Aeneas, a lovely smile. But Hector never smiled, even when we were children. They call me mad, but Hector knows. He has no need of shouting, no need of laurel.”

  Suddenly she looked up, and in the dying light from the lamp which had almost gone out, her eyes had neither pupils nor color.

  “Forget Paris, Helen. But don’t run away.”

  I’m certain she could no longer see me when I got up and went to the door. She did not move but was softly humming a slow tune, her eyes fixed on the ant still on its way across the room.

  14

  I had never welcomed the wind of Troy so sincerely as when it assailed me fiercely at the gate. I didn’t even hide behind my shawl but let it attack me and bring tears to my eyes. I could barely see a couple of steps in front of me, and the sea was a black abyss with the power to sweep away the entire Greek race. I was alone in the cold, alone in a way I had not known for many years; and my grief at the loss of Paris was swallowed up in the wind that pierced my skin, tearing at my muscles till they almost bled. Paris had been my love, I had wanted him and believed in him. I had given him everything; there was no corner of me I had not exposed to him, revealed to him. And one offense had been enough to make him want to detach himself from me, and return to what, Callira whispered softly that evening, had always been his real life.

  Disillusion and scorn had provided me with a safe haven and sealed my wound with stitches of fire, but now the wound had come open. I dropped to my knees on paving stones as cold as the invisible sea beyond the wind. Paris. I hated the memory of his body on mine, corrupted forever by his estrangement. I tried to remember his face on that moonlit night in the port of Amyclae, but the wind slashed it away, bringing back my moans and his, distorted, destroyed by the lamentations of an impure love. I had believed it was real love, I wanted to shout; and months of denial were turning in me a dagger of silent fury. The wind mocked me with long-ago memories of the eyes of Diomedes and the hands of Achilles, destroyed from one day to the next without me even noticing, and superimposed on the unbelievable eyes of Achilles were the eyes of Hermione whom I had left behind forever, and my abandonment of her stopped my throat and took away my breath.

  Diomedes. Achilles. Hermione. And my nameless ghost swept away without regret or scruple by the wind. Hermione. Achilles. Diomedes. My mourning dirge emphasized the stupidity of my mistaken flight, the on
ly thing I should have said no to. But I had been hardly more than a child then, a voice inside me tried to implore, all pride lost; but the only reply that came on the wind was the mocking voice of Theseus returned from the dead to torment me: It was boredom, not love; is that what you’re saying, Helen, you coward? You know only too well that you’d like to suffer for Paris and weep for love, but you can’t do that any longer because your heart was cremated on that pyre, remember? You should have let me carry you off; you’re like me, and now all that is left is the imprint of your dead love.

  The wind was laughing at me and Theseus with it. It would have been pointless to put my hands over my ears or lower my eyes. I’m made of stone, insisted an ever more plaintive voice; but it was no longer true, and even if it had been true it would have meant nothing.

  I opened my eyes to a world of hot steam. I could vaguely remember a woman stretched on the ground with her shawl thrown like a black crow over her head by the wind, and of a man emerging from the wind to carry her away, his arms like dark snakes of unexpected salvation. Beyond that was only the warmth. I opened my eyes to see spears, a whole wall covered with them, reaching from one side of the room to the other. One corner of the room was occupied by a shield, and beside it a helm with a long, lugubrious black horsetail plume.

  Hector was sitting on a low stool in the opposite corner; he got up and came toward me.

  “How are you?” He knelt down on the floor, his face close to mine; I could see my reflection in his eyes, a reflection stamped with lineaments of anguish. I wrapped myself more tightly in the coverlet that someone, perhaps he himself, had laid over me. The bed was narrow, but even when I stretched my legs I could not reach the end of it. It was his bed; when he stood up I looked around the room again, but apart from the weapons and the stool it held nothing but a long wooden chest. The Crown Prince of Troy lived in an armory and slept on a camp bed.

  He came toward me again, carrying a cup. “Drink.”

  I obeyed. My tongue shuddered at the sour taste of goat’s milk even though warm and sweetened by honey. I emptied the earthenware goblet in a single draft and gave it back to him. He put it down on the floor while his dark eyes, Cassandra’s eyes, continued to watch me.

  “You were calling out names,” he said in a neutral tone.

  I noticed, as if for the first time, how deep his voice was, a rich warm bass.

  “A woman, Hermione. Then other names. Greeks.”

  “Hermione is my daughter.” My voice was trying to be neutral, but failed, as useless as a discarded scrap of thread at the bottom of an empty chest.

  “Did you love the Greeks?” His rough timbre was insistent though he was trying hard, like me, to control his voice.

  “I used to think I did. Now I’m not sure anymore.”

  “Because of Paris.” It was not a question. His breathing was slower, the urgency gone, and I would have liked to describe the shadow behind his words as sadness, but Hector was in any case a melancholy man, and I lacked Cassandra’s gift of clairvoyance. I turned my face to the wall, as if by so doing I could negate his presence. He waited a long moment, then took my chin in his fingers and forced me to turn back toward him. I remembered the gentle force of Aeneas holding Cassandra’s wrists.

  “Look at me.”

  Look at me. I did so. He had neither the burning black eyes of Diomedes, the unbearable eyes of Achilles, nor the green eyes of my cremated love, those eyes once so limpid in the star-filled Spartan night. No, Hector’s eyes were like gorges, wells dug deep in the black surface of the earth, or shady valleys in woods otherwise flooded with sunlight. They seemed to see right into me, reading, understanding and forgiving. I slapped away his hand, because his eyes seemed to be invading me with a condescending contempt.

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  He said nothing, but went on looking.

  “You seem to be judging me, as though you understand me; I don’t need your forgiveness.”

  “Nor I yours, Helen; but I’m asking you to forgive me all the same.”

  I turned. “What for?”

  He straightened up, a very tall man kneeling on the floor, and turned away. “I was so happy when I saw Paris go back to being his old self, taking a new woman every night. I was so happy—yes, Helen, I really was—when you stopped smothering yourself in gold and purple and started climbing the path to Cassandra every day. I never thought of the grief that must have crushed you, only of the solitude you had won that seemed like freedom to me.” He bent his head, like the shadowy dark horse that he was, and continued in his dark voice.

  “Freedom for you to come to me. And for me to find you in that bed under that coverlet, by your own free choice. You were right, Helen; I’m a man just like all the others, and there’s nothing different about my desire.”

  He was looking at me over his right shoulder. “Listen. All I want to say is that what keeps me here talking to you as if I was a child is not your body or your name but the sparkle in your eyes the first time I saw you. I never felt contempt for you, only envy. I never had that sparkle and never could have it. But I wanted it.” He stopped, leaving the last two words suspended in the air like a broken feather.

  “Children don’t speak like that.” The words came so slowly, so smoothly, so naturally to me, that I hardly realized I had said them.

  “Nor do men.” There was a funereal cadence in his voice, as if he knew as much as anyone and more than most about the death waiting for him around the corner of the road. I smiled, not from scorn or for fun, but from a strange hidden joy.

  “Heroes then.”

  He turned, and I remembered the first time I had seen his face with its strong features and gloomy expression; it was as if we were back in the thick milky fog of my first day in Troy. In that sea of nothingness where time could curl around like a serpent and return to its beginning.

  “Paris doesn’t matter to me,” I said in a low voice, and it was true, in that golden light that brought past and future together.

  “And the Greeks?”

  I didn’t answer, I just moved closer to the wall, leaving half the narrow bed for him. He surprised me with a smile; I realized Cassandra was right, because there was even something sad in his smile.

  “We can never fit together here, Helen. And I’m in no hurry.”

  “Nor am I. All I want is to sleep. With you.”

  He paused a moment in his smile, then came and sat beside me. The only way for us both to lie on that camp bed was for him to take me in his arms, making the hollow of his collarbone my pillow and his chest my couch. I closed my eyes in the golden light, and slept.

  15

  So began the time of my love for Hector, the season of my last love. The siege beyond the walls was merely a background noise, because I had my light and my sun within the walls, my redemption for a life of unhappiness punctuated by rare moments of joy that had always cost too high a price.

  Five years passed like this, years of serenity when nothing happened, while Troy headed for ruin with no one answering her call. The Greek huts on the shore grew into stone houses, and the ships hauled up on the sand became overgrown with moss and began to rot. Priam’s treasure dwindled and the parties became few and far between. Paris, putting on weight from enforced leisure, hardly ever crossed my path. The whole city knew that the heir to the throne was spending his afternoons after maneuvers in the rooms of the Greek woman; and the whole city saw us together climbing the path to the temple of Apollo and its obliging shade.

  Bitch, bitch, Paris’s lovers would whisper as they slipped silently down the corridors, but their words meant nothing to me. What they did not know was that Hector held the wool for me while I was weaving, and the distaff while I was spinning, and that during the long Trojan evenings he would walk with me in the red shadows cast by the sun in the garden—deserted now that the princesses were sleeping longer hours to preserve their beauty for better times, with somewhere else Queen Hecuba sitting studying her hands
in silence.

  Our world was collapsing around us, and Hector knew it; he knew it from the streets of Troy overgrown with grass because their inhabitants now hardly ever left their houses, exhausted by an epidemic that had decimated them in the third year; and he knew it from the empty Hellespont beyond the besieging Greeks on the beach. He knew it because our allies had not come to the rescue of Troy, and were now falling one after another to the attacks of determined men sent against them by Agamemnon. Asia Minor was the only compensation the obstinate king could offer his tired soldiers. Refugees crowded under the walls discussing Achilles and Diomedes and the anger of Ares.

  These names touched a part of me that was vigilant and on guard, and that knew the reason for the sad warning in Cassandra’s eyes, and the uncontrollable trembling that often seized her. Cassandra knew but did not speak, and pretended like the rest of us that our make-believe peace, our tiny war-free fragment of life, would last forever. Hector’s hand holding my own was no illusion, any more than the anxious shadow of Aeneas at the edge of my field of vision, nor the silent devotion that drove me every day to climb up to the temple of Apollo where Cassandra would be officiating. People see what they want to see, and no one ever noticed the second-in-command of the Trojan army sitting for hours on the wall in the temple courtyard watching Cassandra teaching the secret doctrine of the future to her initiates, while the seasons slowly unfolded over our heads and the world turned calmly and silently on its way, taking with it the obstinate silent love of Aeneas, the rage he took out on his wooden targets, the furious desire in his blood for Cassandra, and the ill-kept secret in his eyes. But men believe what they see, and in him they saw the blood of their own shattered dreams.

  Shut away by that siege whose outcome he could guess, on those garden lawns we still had to ourselves, Hector was happy with me; happy with a twilight happiness in which to lay his head in my lap was the most he ever asked for. A disembodied love, even though my blood raced at the slightest touch of his lips on my neck; it was an attempt to love differently from the only way my flesh had ever known. There was space for such a love in Hector’s infinitely deep eyes, and space in my heart too, among the ruined buildings of Troy on the shores of a Hellespont empty of ships. I knew my new happiness could not last forever, but for five long years I was able to enjoy the blinding privilege of that golden light.