Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  The sweet scents of roasting meat awoke Odysseus from his deep sleep. He stood up, horrified, and ran back to the ship. Too late. They’d slaughtered the fattest of the cattle and had fallen to at their feast.

  The sun-god’s anger blazed, obliterating Odysseus’s puny human fury, and he called on Zeus to punish them.

  ‘Otherwise I’ll descend into Hades and bring daylight to the dead.’

  Zeus answered him. ‘Calm yourself, and shine as you always do for living men on earth, to whom you bring light and life. As for those cattle-killers, they’re dead men. I’ll hit their ship and smash it to kindling. One strike and it will be splinters, litter on the wine-dark sea, and they’ll all be fishfood on the deep sea-bed – all except Odysseus, who did not sanction their sacrilege but forbade it, and who must be permitted to fight his way home and confront the suitors who beset his patient and devoted wife. But he will not go unpunished, I assure you, for many troubles lie yet between him and his Ithaca.’

  Then the skins of the slaughtered cattle stirred eerily and crept along the earth, and the roasting flesh groaned and moaned on the spits as if the joints were still alive and felt the flames, and the entire island echoed uncannily with the sounds of ghostly lowing. Even so, the crew continued to kill and consume for six more days, slaughtering Hyperion’s paragons. What’s done is done, they said, and cannot be undone. If there were consequences to be faced, they would be faced on full stomachs.

  The consequences were dire. No sooner had Odysseus put the island astern than the crew saw a blue-black cloud loom up out of the west and descend on the ship. The frown of Zeus glared out of the cloud, and it came so low that any sailor could have climbed to the top of the mast and touched the god’s beard and begged for mercy.

  Their fates were sealed. The hurricane hit the ship with such force that both forestays broke, the rigging plunged into the bilge, and the mast toppled aft and split open the helmsman’s head, crunching every bone in his skull. He tumbled from the poop, his brains flying, and plummeted straight down the long dark passageways of the waves. His fluttering spirit joined the seabirds as he wailed his descent into hell.

  Zeus was only warming up. Now he thundered and struck, and the already stricken ship reeled under the force of his bolt, and sulphur filled the air. Odysseus clung to different parts of the disintegrating ship, shifting for safety. He could only watch as his crew were pitched from the deck and flung overboard one after another, every man. There was to be no homecoming for any one of them.

  Now Zeus turned his attention to Odysseus. Larboard and starboard, he saw two terrifying seas charging up on him like herds of stampeding cattle, snorting and foaming, and he crouched down deep between them, waiting to be slammed and pounded to pieces.

  The big-browed waves butted the gunwales, kicking up the sea-dust, the white flying foam. They struck together and ripped the ship’s sides clean away from her keel, which was swept away, far along the seas, a naked spine without its ribs, and, clinging to it like a little limpet, the apparently doomed Odysseus.

  Never say doomed. The backstay was a leather rope, and Odysseus used it to lash the mast to the keel and so give himself a chance to ride astride the two timbers. Made fast to their fate, he was hurtled along by the howling winds and found himself staring into the roaring ocean, inches from his eyes. He thought he was looking into his grave.

  Not yet. And not here. The hurricane went back into the west and was followed at once by gales from the south. Odysseus understood that he was headed back to that awful strait and that the gods now made sport of him for their pleasure before the end of his life. Sure enough, after being propelled all night long he saw Scylla and Charybdis looming up again out of the dawn, still at their baleful trade. Scylla would hook him up in a second, indiscriminate among dogfish and dolphins, while for Charybdis it was her downward hour, and the last for the hero if he remained on the raft, to be whistled down to death, down the long corridors of the sea. So he prepared himself, made a mighty leap from the keel, and clutched wildly at the branches of the fig tree . . .

  Impossible even for an Olympian athlete, but easy for a woman at her loom to pluck up a man up out of the spiralling staircases of the ocean and weave him instead to a tree, from whose branches he would hang like a bat until mast and keel, still lashed together, came spinning up again out of the death-hole. Only then did Odysseus let himself go – and drop.

  Like a stone . . .

  I went so deep down into the water I thought I’d never come back up again, but with bursting lungs and blacksmith’s heart I broke the surface and saw the beautiful blue sky. I got astride the timbers again and rowed with my arms as best I could till I was clear of the strait. And then I drifted – for nine days and nights if you can believe that, if you want to believe it – till I was almost dead of hunger and thirst and exhaustion and cold. It wasn’t until the night of the tenth day that the gods ended my suffering and I was washed up at last on a friendly shore.

  FORTY-FIVE

  I was delirious when she found me. I’d almost drowned. And that old story about drowning, the one about the story of your life flashing past you – it’s fucking true, I can vouch for it. Reliving the war in Troy took less than a second, a conflict lost in impossible time, then setting sail, a burping cannibal, a vulnerable slut, fuck her into loveliness, never let her go, leave her for home, for hell, the strait and narrow – no, no, come back to her, back to the war, the glorious dead, the deadly dream, the songs the Sirens sang, the thousand ships, Achilles, Agamemnon dead, the ox-meat dribbling down beards, burned by the sun, eating the gods, eaten by the sea, all my men, all those men . . .

  The tumbling thunder in my skull assured me I was drowning, and what struck me in my last moments of quarter-consciousness was the sheer fucking banality of it, the whole pointless process of collapsing, capitulating to the common lot. But now the sting and hiss of the tide told me no – I was ashore among the rollers, I’d made it, I wasn’t going to drown, wherever I was, whoever I was. I was lashed to the keel of the wreck – the shipwreck, oh fuck! All those sailors, all those men at Troy, eaten by the earth, eaten by the sea: did I say it or think it? No, sea in my throat, speech impossible, sunlight, blinding brine, wet sand, don’t try to talk yet, yes, you’ve just about had it, haven’t you? Have I? Had I? Fresh water in a shell, held to my lips, water, fresh, not salt, fresh as Helicon, oh, nectar! Oh, fucking nectar! Her unbraided hair fell over me, a river, a waterfall, black gold, hanging round her eyes, more water, drink the river, drink her hair, nectar . . .

  ‘Are you a goddess?’

  ‘If you want me to be.’

  ‘Where the fuck am I?’

  ‘Thapsos.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Thapsos island. You’re safe, sailor man. Who are you? Where did you come from?’

  ‘Hell. Out of fucking hell.’

  ‘Well, you’d better come home with me.’

  ‘Home. Husband?’

  ‘Drowned.’

  ‘Drowned?’

  Drowned, drowned.

  It was a simple house, with a simple bed – if a bed with her in it could ever have been called simple. That first night it was. I must have slept for sixteen hours straight. Maybe it was sixteen days. I don’t know where she slept. But when I woke up I was warm, for the first time in what felt like years. There was a fire in the hearth. I smelled cedar-wood, gorgeous guff, aroma of Aphrodite. She bathed me in front of it, just like a slave-girl, washed away the sea-scum, applied old wine to the most recent scars and gashes, of which I’d become quite a collector, courtesy of Troy, and other wars. I was starkers, but that didn’t bother me, or her. She was no fancy lady. She trimmed my hair and gave me a good oiling all over.

  ‘You have a nice thick prick.’

  Rest of me’s sea-shrivelled – too long in the water. Check the balls for barnacles.’

  ‘These aren’t balls – they are barnacles.’

  ‘Well, you’ve seen everything now.’
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  ‘Yes, better put some clothes on, and we’ll eat. These are some of my husband’s. He was taller than you.’

  ‘Was he also older than you?’

  ‘Younger.’

  ‘Too bad.’

  ‘Fisherman. Lost in a storm, never came home. Known only to the gods.’

  He would have been missing her cooking, if he could still eat. She was a great cook, the best since Circe – grilled goat and great grog. You can’t beat it, coming back from the dead. And that cedar-smoke again.

  ‘Aroma of Aphrodite.’

  This time I said it out loud.

  ‘Aphrodite, eh? And what about Morpheus?’

  I asked her where my couch would be.

  She stepped out of her robe – it took one incredible second – and lay back on the one bed, back in the cedar-scented darkness. There was another scent. The shadows danced around her, round that other darkness, between her legs.

  ‘Couch? I’ll be your couch tonight.’

  She drew me down onto her smooth Olympian belly.

  ‘And you’ll never need another. You’ll never want another either, I can promise you that.’

  She kept that promise. For quite some time.

  ‘And you never re-married. No other young men on Thapsos?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘And suitors?’

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘None that suited. None that suited me.’

  ‘But me – why? For fuck’s sake, I’m old as the sea – with barnacles for balls.’

  ‘Now, Odysseus, old lad, I already had a fisherman. I don’t need another.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re fishing for compliments, I fear.’

  She gave me that side-long smile, the one I came to recognise, the irresistible one, the one that always spoke the unspoken – fuck me. I’m too shy to say it, even my eyes are shy. Fuck me.

  I fucked her.

  I fucked her, she fucked me, we fucked each other. Nightly. We fucked the stars round the sky. We fucked the steadfast constellations round the year. The Great Bear growled at us. Can’t you two do something else? Anything? Arcturus winked. Aldebaran understood. There was something beyond bronze and pillage and raping women. Something? Can stars speak?

  Calypso was that something.

  That’s her name on the web, the one Penelope gave her, the hidden one, the concealer, the one that explains her hero husband’s long concealment, the long sojourn on . . . what was the island again? Ogygia? Let it be. Let it be Ogygia. Let Calypso be her name. Let her clothes hanging out to dry be sails in the fury of my heart, in the longings of my soul, billowing me back to Ithaca. Why not? Nothing is what it seems to be, nothing is but what is not, and the sea is littered with islands that make the impossible possible, even probable, even Ogygia. Then yes, so be it, Ogygia was the home of yet another goddess, the one with the voice of a mortal woman but the wiles of a witch. None other than the daughter of Atlas – who else but the fair Calypso?

  And yes, she had to be a goddess, like all the rest. She was the goddess of oblivion. No woman could have kept old Odysseus against his will, Odysseus of the many wiles. It was the old story, the story of the web, the story of my life. And as island goddesses live in caves, Penelope made her up an enticing one, a lofty cavern surrounded by a grove of elegant alders and poplars and sweet-smelling cypresses where the birds roosted during the murmuring nights, falcons and seabirds and owls. A great vine hung over the mouth of the cave, thick with clustering grapes, purplish-pink, fit for a goddess. Inside the cave itself there was ample room – its walls expanded as you entered, but the entrance was little more than a fissure, a shaggy slit. It was the cave of making, the cavern of eternal male desire. And what went on inside it was a love-making divinely imposed on her poor shipwrecked spouse, the long-suffering Odysseus.

  The meadows round about were thick with parsley and sprinkled with violets, and fresh crystal streams gurgled through the long lush grasses. Stonecrop ran along the limestones, a wine-dark topping, a haze of campions, marigolds, chrysanthemums, spires of viper’s bugloss, orange and yellow and pink, and wild sweetpeas and madness-curing alyssum – all accurate, including the cedars and the cedar-smoke, woodsmoke wafted across the island like an aphrodisiac, hanging in the air.

  Accurate? It had to be fucking accurate. I’d become quite the floral scholar on Ogygia, with nothing else to do but pine for home, and so I spun the story and Penelope spun the web. Flowers are innocent, unlike actions, and as for our thoughts, supposing they’re unhealthy, unwelcome, even ugly? Better to be slippery than to tell the truth, at least not the whole truth.

  And yet . . .

  And yet islands are not innocent. Even plants are not as innocent as they seem. Zeus bewitched Europa as she plucked flowers in a field, with a crocus he breathed from his mouth. Creusa was raped by Apollo as she picked crocuses. Hylas was pulled down and drowned by nymphs as he drew water from a spring in a hollow surrounded by herbs. Helen herself was the heart-eating flower of love. And the god Pan – stop to refresh your feet in his pristine springs and he’d bugger you in a second, or crush your skull with his club. Calypso’s island paradise, with its meadows of parsley and crocuses, violets, irises, hyacinths, narcissi and roses, was the scene of Persephone’s rape by Hades. King of the dead. The island was a trap, and the surrounding sea was Calypso’s loom. She was an abstraction. She was unreal.

  And yet Penelope got every detail of Calypso absolutely correct, the upturned tits, the full-moon aureoles, the curtaining hair, everything down to her smallest toenail, as if she’d been watching us fucking. How did she do it? Her mind-reading again, or else I talk in my sleep, telling all to Morpheus. Or she sees my dreams.

  When Calypso stood up, her long black hair hung to her ankles. In bed, that hair was spread across the sheets like spiked black lightning. And after sex she’d cover me with it, no other covers, and go to sleep. I never moved from her. Leave her couch? Only death could have made up another couch for me, on which I’d have stretched out longer. I’d lost all my friends. I was alone and far from home. The sea was strewn with snares, its islands illusions, enchantments. Leave her? Leave her couch? I didn’t even want to leave her side. I must have felt like that for all of those seven months.

  So for seven years, Odysseus was Calypso’s cold reluctant lover, a bed-slave on Ogygia, and not one night passed when he was not required to make love to her, she being free from all courses of blood, being a nymph and also a love-nymph, satisfied during each act of love by her captive’s enforced thrustings, and always lulled into a sweet sleep in his arms, but ever exacting his amorous embraces again in the morning, and the next night, and all night too, till Aurora’s pink slit opened up the east on another morning and Aphrodite rested. The bewitching nymph had saved him from the sea but had saved him for herself. Out of Poseidon’s white cauldron and into the wet fire . . .

  . . . of her unquenchable cunt.

  Who would not weep to see it on a web? An exhausted Odysseus, supine and confined, in bondage, and Calypso coming down on him . . .

  . . . like a nympho.

  And with sweet mouth and extracting tongue consuming him, erect on Ogygia, till her lips . . .

  . . . suck out my essence.

  Her lips suck forth his soul. See, where it flies . . .

  . . . my butterfly soul. See where it goes, over the ocean, back to my bonny, leaving me lifeless every time, the spirit flying free, homeward to Ithaca, every time.

  And so you see, it sickened and died. Everything wearies and grows tired: empires, affairs, sex with the same lover, night after night. It cloyed and then it jaded. The sword grows tired of the sheath. My body wearied of her. It makes no difference how you phrase it, the truth is simple and has to be confronted. But whenever I talked about going home and seeing my wife again, her answer was always the same. She stepped straight out of her robe and stood clothed only by her hair.

  ‘Did
your wife ever look like this, Odysseus?’

  I had to admit I’d never seen a woman like her.

  ‘And she’ll look even less like me now, now that time has taken its toll. The crow’s feet will be stepping out from her eyes and strutting all over her wrinkled face. The frost will have settled on her hair. The hips will be wider, the belly broader, the buttocks bulging, the breasts blue-veined, sagging, hanging loose . . .’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, come off it! The war didn’t last that long – you make it sound like ten years!’

  ‘Doesn’t it feel like it?’

  I had to admit it did.

  ‘And for her too – even longer for a woman at home. Age occurs on the inside, you know, working outwards. You’ll see.’

  She smiled her goddess smile.

  ‘But when can I go home, Calypso?’

  The smile froze.

  ‘Home to what? To her? She’ll grow old and die, as women do. This is your journey’s end, Odysseus, here on Ogygia. This is the sea-mark of your utmost hopes, Calypso your prize and only desire. Stay here with me and you will never grow old. I offer you an eternal present, an erasure of all awareness of past or future. I offer you immortality. There are plenty of precedents. I’ll make you a god.’

  This was going nowhere. I was going nowhere. It was time to bring on the Immortals.

  Athene complained to Zeus, who in turn employed Hermes to go to Calypso with the Olympian decision, that enough was enough. It was time to release Odysseus from bondage and send him on his way. The Ogygian sojourn was over. Ithaca awaited him. And so did the suitors – although they didn’t know it yet – who were plaguing his patient wife and attempting to seduce her, murder her son and seize her husband’s estate. A terrible revenge must be taken, and only Odysseus could exact it. Calypso’s ardour came second to the divine dictates. Destiny is unshunnable.