Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  ‘I love a good fight! I wonder who’ll win? Mind you, I could wipe out the two of them together with one arm tied behind my back and only one leg to stand on.’

  Nobody gave a fuck about that. We didn’t care how well they fought. We didn’t even care who won, just as long as it brought the war to an end. And if they killed each other, the two sides would give the bastards a combined round of applause and we’d all go home.

  Both men’s helmets had huge horsehair crests and the plumes nodded ominously as they advanced. They stopped. Everybody shut up. A moment of sudden and complete silence. There were only twenty paces left between them . . .

  Penelope shifts the action far from the plain to an upper chamber in the palace complex, high up inside the city walls, an inner sanctuary removed from the world of dust and blood and men. Here at her loom sits Helen, the prize fought for by two civilisations, two armies and their many allies, and now by two men, who prize the world’s desire more than their own lives, or the lives of thousands of soldiers. In this quiet chamber she sits spinning her story, the story of her life and of the war – a web within a web. And this domestic scene in Troy stands at an almost surreal remove from everything that exists on the plain outside and down below. The remoteness of this soundless, inner world of spinning and weaving from the terrible rending and tearing that is the work of war is also a symptom of its helplessness. The two armies know the terms of Helen’s fate long before she does. And when the walls of Troy come down, that remote and soundless bubble-world will suddenly burst, and the quietly weaving women will find themselves widowed, childless, abducted, raped, enslaved.

  Into her web Helen is weaving all the sorrows and sufferings that both Greeks and Trojans have undergone for her over the years. It is the ninth year of the war. And although it is a huge purple web of double width, even the weave within the weave cannot contain all the miseries she has caused.

  At that point, one of Priam’s daughters, Laodica, came running in, nimble-footed as Iris, to tell her what was happening: her husband and lover were about to fight for her, and Helen was seized – so she later said – by an uncontrollable yearning for her husband and her home and her own people. It came to her all at once, the enormity of what she’d done, and in a sudden blur and flurry of tears she got up and left the room and ran up onto the battlements by the Scaean Gate.

  Up there, talking to Priam, sat the very old men of Troy, the city elders, bald and toothless, withered white-headed survivors of forgotten wars. Extreme old age had put an end to their useful days, and now they sat like cicadas, chirping bitterly, sweetly, of days gone by, and regretting the present too, because of the war. Yet even these shrivelled old men of Troy, the cicadas with voices so piping and shrill, whispered when she came into their midst that she was strangely like a goddess to look at, and they had to admit it was small wonder that men were ready to suffer so much for such a creature.

  Was it? Take an even deeper look at her, and see if you dare to disagree.

  She appeared on the battlements with the wind in her hair, swept sweetly across her mouth and blowing her dress against her breasts and legs, half hinting at what had made Paris so ravenous for her and Menelaus so mad to bring her back. She shone, she glittered, she glowed. She wore clothes that had been saturated with the best olive oils before being washed out again. And she was fragrant – scented with hyssop, sweet sage and cypress, anise and rose. Beneath the celebrated tresses, her smoky eyes were dark with galena, charred almond shells, soot and frankincense. Penelope is strong on those particular details.

  And if you care to look closer still, the detail draws you further in.

  Her dresses were dyed with saffron and indigo and madder red. Eggs and onion skins, salt and vinegar and human urine – there was no end to the concoctions that had gone into her garments. Gold discs glittered on her, sewn into the clothes. Her breasts were tightly bodiced to keep them high and pouting. Sometimes she wore them bare. And Paris kept wax casts of them, so the whisper went among the cicadas, though he could cup the real thing any night of the week and bury his head between them.

  Go on, feed deep, deeper still on the detail – the bodice insistent, the long hair flaming past the waist and running in rivulets across the forehead. Look again into the kohl-blackened eyes, wide and inviting, how they pull you in like the forest pools of woody Ida.

  So the old men on the walls mused on Helen. They gorged themselves on the gossip of her slightest move. Love, they murmured, runs after her like puppies.

  ‘And men,’ muttered the Trojan women, ‘sniff after her like dogs after bitch-cunt, their balls hard with lust.’

  They eyed her up and down as they said it, assessing the charms, calculating the lives she’d cost them, the misery, with her slinky ankles and follow-me-fuck-me sandals, and those breasts held so high. She was the one to die for all right: home-wrecker, marriage-breaker, man-maddening, enticing, libidinous bitch-whore, the gorgeous grave of so many soldiers. One bitch, so many battles.

  And even the cicadas conceded, even the chirping, shrivelled kings of politics, who’d bathed in moon-browed Helen, even they conceded, in spite of the faint far-off tingling in their dry old balls. A goddess, yes. All the same, we can let this goddess go, we can do without her. Let her go away in the ships, and let the Greeks leave us to see out our old age in peace, our last failing decrepit days. Old age is hell enough without the hell of war.

  But Penelope won’t, can’t, still can’t let her go, won’t leave her alone. Obsessive jealousy? hatred? fascination? reluctant worship? Fixated, she lets Helen take control of the web, filling it with images of other women – not the statues or murals, or the beauties you see on vases and drinking bowls, firm-fleshed females with plump bums, luscious lips, perfect breasts and pearly teeth – no, none of these. Instead you have the parade of life as it really is. Look at the gaps in the teeth, the moustaches on upper lips. Observe the squints and scabs and warts, the sagging mammaries, the bulging buttocks, the white wobbly atrocious thighs. That’s other women, Penelope rages. That’s how men are made to see us, when Helen’s in the room.

  And here she comes again, looking even more than half divine among these sad wrecks of womanhood. She’s back on the walls to launch her counter-attack on Priam’s grave advisers, the old men who worship her but would let her go. Along the battlements she sways and paces, the swing of her hips intoxicates. The wise cicadas perched above the Scaean Gates – they muse again on those ankles, breasts and thighs, and once again they lose their wisdom momentarily. Her beauty muddles their statesmanship. Maybe she should stay after all. Under the silver hairs and bald scalps the brains go soft as she fills them with regret for all they’ve lost, all the errors and wrong decisions they’ve made in their time. And though it’s too late now to bring back their past failures and rectify them, put right the old muddle of their lives, somehow she seems to offer them that very possibility, for one illusory moment, whose effect lingers like sorrow, like joy.

  On she goes, making love to the air as she walks. The wind kisses her and comes away unsatisfied. Even gentle Zephyrus abandons Flora and follows Helen, wanting more. You follow him as he follows her, you follow those swaying hips, and the air in her wake is not only scented by her but quickened by her movement, and the invisible tremor you’re left with is the only measure of her beauty. You can’t quantify it, can’t put it into music, words or even pictures. Only Penelope comes close, though even she can’t capture the complete Helen effect. The web can’t catch her movement, her scent, her palpable aura. You can’t find it in a nipple, an eyelash, a toenail. You weave the entire face and figure and it’s still not there, though it’s reaching for the unreachable. Only music perhaps might succeed in expressing the things for which we quite simply cannot find words. But there is no known music, no melodies yet composed that have translated her into sound.

  What was it about her? Somehow her very presence seemed to summon up some glorious past. She poured scorn on the trivial b
abble and bubble of the present, just by being there, just by existing. She unsettled people, and what was so unsettling was that they couldn’t say what exactly she made them want, or why. She pointed the way to something else, apart from herself, beyond herself, something all men ache for, as a soldier aches for home, the desert for water, as the drowning man craves air, the exile a breath of native land, and yet that something remained undefinable. She inspired an ultimate longing, a pain that had no herb to heal it, a sadness that had no object of satisfaction. It was an objectless anxiety, an absence, an emptiness, a longing that was an end in itself and so could never end, like the futile human quest for happiness, perfection. It was a longing for a longing, if you like. What more is there to be said? Helen was Elysium. She was the only possible paradise that remained impossible, the one that was lost and would always be lost. That’s why she caused such pain.

  And on top of all that you just wanted to fuck her. Every man did. If he didn’t, he wasn’t a man. Even the old men on the walls, even though they knew they couldn’t, even if she’d lain with them one and all. She was the full-fleshed ghost of their old desires, their vanished lives.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ said one to another, ‘just to take her clothes off? That’s all – just take them off. Nothing else.’

  But Priam, always courteous, silenced the licentious twittering. He spoke gently to her, seeing her distress, and asked her to point out by name the various Greek heroes. That was Penelope’s device, her means of putting us on parade for the web. Naturally, in nine years of war – in web-time at least – Priam would have known all the illustrious Greeks by sight long since, and by name. Looking at the two armies drawn up on the plains below, and the two contenders facing one another in between, he assured her that any blame lay not with her but, along with the outcome, in the lap of the gods. Some of the wives standing by sniggered that the cause and the blame lay not in the lap of the gods but in her own lap – right between her legs, to be precise. She was used to such sneers, but Priam silenced them too.

  So Helen leant over the battlements and pointed out the brightest stars in the Greek firmament, blurred here and there by the wisps of mist that had begun blowing in from the sea.

  Pride of place went to Agamemnon, king of men. He had a head like Zeus, an eye like Ares to threaten and command, a waist like the war-god’s waist when Aphrodite lay with him, and a breast like Poseidon’s on a day when the white horses ride the waves. All idealised to the sky, the principal omissions being shaft of satyr and brain of bull.

  But all this was private propaganda and truth the common soldier, lowest on the list. Ajax, Idomeneus – Helen went through all of us, special mention being made of myself, son of Laertes and king of rocky Ithaca. Not that my infamous stature was enhanced. I stood shorter than Menelaus by a head, though I was broader-shouldered, as in life, and looked more imposing, the statelier of the two. When I spoke, men listened, though at first glance you wouldn’t have thought I’d be a man of any address at all. But this is where the real Penelope touch came in, the image I liked best of all. Out of my mouth floated a few white flakes, scarcely noticeable at first, but then the flakes came bigger and faster as I spoke, getting into my rhetorical stride, the imagined words falling as thick and crisp and cruel as the flakes in a winter blizzard, and you knew, although you couldn’t hear the speech from the soundless web, that you were privileged to be listening to a matchless speaker, the master of debate. Words were always my best weapons.

  But where, Helen was asking, were her two brothers, Castor the horseman and Polydeuces the boxer? Hadn’t they too come from lovely Lacedaemon? Or couldn’t they bring themselves to enter the field for the sheer shame of it, knowing that their sister was up there on the walls, the bane of the Trojan women and the lust of the old men’s loins, her reproach wide in the world? Little did she know, even as she asked, that they were lying long dead in earth, in the lap of lovely Lacedaemon, their native land.

  That imaginary ignorance of hers was a false twist in the web, a touch of pathos, a touch of Penelope’s cunning hand, twisting history, nothing more. But now Helen stiffened and caught her breath. Down on the plain the duel for her was about to begin.

  Paris threw first and the spear was dead on target. You could see it from the second it left his hand and went whistling and singing down the wind, intended to split his opponent’s skull. But Menelaus thrust up his shield to meet the missile and it bent to hell on the bronze.

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘That’s right, pretty boy! Now try mine, you useless fucker!’

  Menelaus hurled – with equal accuracy and a combined strength and speed that made the spear go like an arrow. Both sides shouted in anticipation.

  ‘Fucking hell!’

  ‘What a fuck-surge!’

  ‘Check three!’

  ‘No, bronze to balls, man! Cover your fucking tackle!’

  ‘Too fucking late!’

  ‘He’s dogshit!’

  ‘The war’s fucking over!’

  If only. It was far from that. Paris traced the trajectory, and, instead of using his shield, did his show-off bit by swerving. He almost bought it on account of that act of vanity, but he got away with it. A close one, though. His tunic was ripped at the side, but that was all. He whooped and punched the air – then shagged it for good measure.

  ‘Fuck you, Menelaus! And fuck your wife too – only I’ll be doing it again tonight, old man! And you can chew your snot!’

  Menelaus went red-eyed and berserk. He dropped his shield and came charging up to the little bastard, chancing the second spear. Paris didn’t even have time to use it. Menelaus was on him and the sword flashed down like lightning, a real skull-splitter. But the blade shattered on the crest of the helmet and the jagged splinters flew everywhere.

  ‘Fuck!’

  Menelaus gawped at the stump in his hand and Paris gave him a sort of glazed grin. The luck of the gods, that bastard.

  Not for long, though. Menelaus grabbed the plume and pulled him to the ground. Then he started dragging him back to our ranks, where he’d have torn him to pieces for sure. Even now, he was half-throttled by the chinstrap and still dazed from the blow on the head. It looked like he was dead meat and the expedition was over. Our men were cheering already and there was even applause from sections of the Trojan side. But then the wind that had blown his tart’s breasts into prominence did him a huge and unexpected favour. It brought the sea-mists gusting suddenly inland in thick swirling white shrouds and the duellists disappeared. Nobody could see his own hand in front of his face, it was so dense. Then the veils parted, and there stood Menelaus looking like a complete idiot with an empty helmet in his hand and no sign of Paris. The little prick had given him the slip.

  ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

  He smashed the helmet to the ground and came stomping back to the ranks. He was furious but was greeted with loud applause.

  ‘It doesn’t matter – you’ve won!’

  ‘He left the field, the cowardly bastard!’

  ‘The cunt scarpered! He ran away!’

  ‘Terms of the oath. He’s fucked up. Helen’s ours!’

  ‘It’s over, lads – we’re going home!’

  Agamemnon sent heralds to the walls to proclaim his brother the winner, given Paris’s abandonment of the duel, which amounted to surrender and defeat. Code of combat. They demanded that the oath be honoured, with the immediate return of Helen and all her goods, plus the promised recompense and a cessation of hostilities forthwith.

  There was no immediate answer to that. Paris had turned up in the city unhurt, apart from the red weals on his worthless neck, and instead of hiding his face in shame the cynical bastard sent out a message that he hadn’t run away, he’d been spirited off in the mist by Aphrodite, his protectress – which was his way of telling us to go and fuck ourselves. He’d lost consciousness and found himself back in Troy, simple as that. No one had lost or won. The duel was a draw. There would be no surrender
of Helen, no recompense, nothing.

  Menelaus stood and screamed at the walls.

  ‘Treacherous fucking bastard!’

  Silence. And a few stones.

  If the citizens could have had their way, they’d have flung the cunt over the walls and lobbed his trollop after him. They loathed him to a man and her to a woman. But he was the king’s offspring and could do as he pleased. Which is exactly what he did. Take a look and see.

  Lapped by warm water, Paris lies back in the bronze bath and lets the maidens pour balm on his bruises. Daintily hidden underwater is one maidenly hand. Paris has a faraway, contented look on his face. He is happy to rise up and stand naked before the girls to be dried and admired. Then he puts on soft-scented clothes and makes for Helen’s bedchamber.

  She isn’t there. She is still up on the walls, sighing her soul towards the Grecian tents, longing for her husband – at least that is how she makes it appear. She is surrounded by the Trojan women. One of them plucks at her dress and murmurs in her ear.

  ‘Come down from the walls. Paris is back home from the field and he’s waiting for you in bed. You wouldn’t believe how dashing he looks, though he’s just been in a duel. Fought for you. He wants you to make love to him. He’s gagging for you.’

  Helen turns to her. She looks quite like the old wool-worker who used to make the most beautiful yarns for her back in Sparta, and the voice is the very same. But as she looks closer, she sees through the disguise and flashes back at her.

  ‘Make love to a coward? Never. He’s not back from the duel – he ran from it! And I’m not running to his bed. Why don’t you get in instead? Or will it give you a bigger thrill to watch the two of us doing it?’

  Aphrodite reveals herself in a gorgeous explosion of anger and beauty.

  ‘You stubborn wretch! Don’t dare provoke me. If I desert you, you’ll find out what it’s like to be friendless on Olympus. Now get down there and do your duty – to me and to your husband!’