Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  And so the giant-killer himself, golden-sandalled Hermes, with wand in hand, plummets down like a stone down from Olympus, all the way from the upper air to the Pierian range. From there, he swoops over the sea and skims it like a gull, hunting the finny prey, now down the desolate gulfs of the dreadful deep, now across the infinite blue ploughlands and the crumpling graveyards of the waves, its wing tips wetted with spray as it speeds, taking the troughs and crests in its flight and never slowing its course. So Hermes rides the ocean, tirelessly to Ogygia, where the nymph of the braided tresses still holds Odysseus against his will and nightly seeks to wean his heart from Ithaca.

  Calypso is seated weaving in her cave, fragrant with cedar-smoke and thyme. She sings sweetly as she works the loom – golden shuttle, golden voice. The cave brims with her lilting and her labour. Odysseus sits apart, disconsolate on the shore, torturing himself as always with tears, studying the skylines with streaming eyes and sobbing out his soul across the barren wastes that lie between him and Ithaca, where Penelope also sits weaving, keeping the suitors from her chamber door and pining for the husband who pines for her.

  The scene made the gods weep too. See, they said, this hero of Troy, a cold lover compelled to gratify the desires of a hot goddess who has long since ceased to please but who plots to marry him against his will. The sweetness of life has ebbed from him, and the years wheel round him like the gulls. And that was the scene Hermes, messenger of the gods, found when he dropped suddenly on Ogygia.

  Calypso was surprised to see her visitor.

  ‘A rare one indeed,’ she said, looking up from the loom.

  ‘Rare? That goes without saying,’ said Hermes. ‘Not even a winged god would choose to go scudding across the vast tract of salt water I have just covered. I thought I’d never get here. But as you can see, I did. And I’d better tell you right away, this is no courtesy visit. I’m under orders from Zeus. So are you. And you must obey.’

  The nymph’s eyes clouded, but Hermes did not soften the message.

  ‘Here it is. You have Odysseus here with you, a prisoner to your passion, and you’ve had him for seven years. It’s been long enough. As a matter of fact it’s been too long. It’s time to give him up. You have to let him go. It’s as simple as that.’

  Calypso’s lovely lip trembled and the clouded eyes rained tears, the dewy tears that only a goddess can drop. The quivering lips tried to form a word. Hermes said it for her.

  ‘Why? You want to know why? I’ll tell you. Athene went to Zeus and Zeus appointed me as envoy and here I am. There’s really nothing more to add – except the obvious, which is that a man who spent ten years away from home fighting and who has since been dogged by disasters at sea and one misfortune after another on land, followed by a further seven years’ captivity on this island – nearly twenty years all told – is long overdue his reward. He has the right to return at last to his wife, not to mention his estate, which is presently being eaten away by lice. You’ve made him satisfy you every night in your bed – I can see how well used it is, if you don’t mind my pointing it out – and you’ve had your fun. It’s over. Zeus has decreed that Odysseus is not destined to end his days with you, nor to enter into immortality on this flowery isle, lovely and pleasant though it is. Be ready to say goodbye.’

  The grief of the goddess quickly turned to rage.

  ‘You Olympians, you’re all the same, loose livers yourselves. It’s perfectly in order for you to sleep with whomever you please, using concealment and force when it suits you, but you can’t bear to let a nymph have a mortal man for her bed companion even when she has chosen him openly.’

  Hermes smiled.

  ‘Bed companion? More of a bed-slave, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I’ll ignore that attempt to avoid the issue. I can sit here all day and enumerate examples of what I’ve just said. I can weave them into my web, if you like, and it will be a long one!’

  She reeled them off.

  Rose-lipped Aurora fell for Orion, offending the other gods, and in the end Artemis, in all her chastity, got up from her golden throne and attacked him with her arrows, gentle but lethal, leaving him dead in Ortygia.

  And when the lovely Demeter felt the deep need in her, she lay back in the thrice-ploughed fallow field and enjoyed impetuous intercourse with her beloved Iasion. The goddess’s love struck him like thunder and he was raised to ecstasy, but Zeus hurled his own thunder at him as soon as he heard of it and struck him dead.

  Odysseus was as good as dead when he was beached on Ogygia. But for a certain nymph, he would not have survived.

  ‘And if you want him to stay alive, Calypso, you’d better let him go. Otherwise he may share the same fate as Orion and Iasion, and you yourself may not go unpunished. You don’t want any thunderbolts aimed at Ogygia, do you? Or even the arrows of Artemis.’

  So Calypso came down to the edge of the sounding sea and told Odysseus to cease his sighing and end his long scrutiny of the skyline. The Ogygian sojourn was over.

  ‘And yet.’

  She couldn’t refrain from saying it.

  And yet, if you only knew the further miseries and dangers that lie in store for you before you reach Ithaca – and Ithaca itself will be a bloody affair – you wouldn’t lift a foot from this island to risk your life on the barren sea encircled by ruthless enemies. No, you’d stay if you only knew. You’d embrace immortality – and me.’

  Encirclement again, the greatest fear, the greatest desire, the wrath of Poseidon, the arms of Aphrodite. No man is made of stone, and it takes an iron man to resist a thrusting belly, bared for him nightly. Odysseus was such a man and the gods gave him the best words with which to answer and appease the nymph.

  ‘Calypso, you are lovely beyond compare, and my wife is a mere mortal. In that respect you are queen of my heart. But I can’t deny that I long to see my home again, and the wife of my youth, and whatever awaits me out on the wine-dark sea. Shipwreck, suffering, death itself – I am willing to hazard all, as the sailor does, for home, where my heart is, and for the son of my loins. One more adventure is nothing to a man who has endured as I have endured, for I have lost everything. Let it come on then, and let me go.’

  One last night of love in the shaggy cave. Calypso took her fill of him. Penelope stands patiently by the bedside, in spirit, on the web, filled with understanding and with deep admiration for her husband’s stoicism. A man must harden himself when a goddess insists on intercourse, especially when it is to be for the last time.

  ‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry, Odysseus.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘take your time.’

  ‘The last time.’

  The last time on Thapsos. The last time on Ogygia.

  Calypso saw him off in style. The goddess herself was not powerful enough to produce a ship, but she provided all the tools; a big bronze axe with a sharpened double blade and a handsome olive-wood handle was put into one hand, and a shining polished adze into the other. Then she took him to a part of the island forest where the alders and poplars and firs shot up tallest into the far blue sky, all long seasoned timbers which had lost their sap and which would make a buoyant boat to course the waves. Odysseus felled twenty of these, cut the keel, fixed the flooring, fitted the deck, shaped the gunwales, stepped the mast, saw to the yard, the steering oar, the sails, lashed the braces, halyards and sheets on board, and dragged her down on rollers into the shining sea – all in four days and all on his own, a single-handed hero, while the goddess stacked the vessel well with wine and water, and with corn and delectable meats. It was a glorious departure.

  I rolled over from her and lay propped on one elbow in the thinning dark. Night had almost rusted away; dawn bled through the open door. Aurora was at it again. She stayed as she was, sullen, legs still splayed, spilling the trickling seeds, like thistle-milk, froth of the fields, summery but sad, an expense of the self, a waste. A shame.

  ‘Shame on you, Odysseus.’

  ‘You say?
’

  ‘You can pump your spunk into me just as if it were the same as any night, just as you’ve done all these months – and then walk away from me, just like that, as if it hadn’t happened. As if I’d never happened to you. As if we hadn’t happened to each other. That’s a fucking shame. Wouldn’t you say it was a shame?’

  ‘It’s a shame.’

  ‘And a waste.’

  ‘And a waste.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘Things happen. They do happen. And they unhappen. Like people. Like life. And death.’

  ‘Well, this is death for me. I just don’t understand why you’ve got to go.’

  I went to the door and looked out, confronted the east.

  ‘Not another fucking beautiful day! It’s that skyline, you see. You see? It drives me fucking mad. Can’t you close your legs?’

  ‘You mean where you wounded me? And there’s always a skyline, by the way, wherever you are. You’ll see it in Ithaca just the same as you see it here. Our lives are skylines. What else is there?’

  ‘Another skyline. Only not the same one. I have to change my sky.’

  ‘It’s boredom then, isn’t it? As simple as that? You’re bored with me. I’m not enough for you. No woman will ever be enough for you. Am I right?’

  Was she right?

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Once I heard of a city where the people lived in constant fear of a barbarian invasion. They were a civilised people, and they were terrified. The invasion was imminent, so their spies informed them – any day now. So they prepared for it. They prepared themselves so well they were almost looking forward to it. And do you know what? It didn’t happen. The attack didn’t come. The barbarians just fucked off and attacked some other city. And guess what? The citizens were disappointed, frustrated. They didn’t know it, but actually they wanted war. They wanted war because they’d grown tired of peace. They were sick of it. In the end, the horrors of boredom are a lot worse than the horrors of war. I don’t know if the story’s true, but it rings true to me. There’s a truth in there somewhere. Maybe that’s why I don’t really want to go home, if you can believe that. But it’s also why I have to leave here. This has been home for me, it’s become home, it is home, and I have to get away from it – not from you.’

  ‘Take me with you then.’

  ‘You know I can’t.’

  ‘I know you can’t.’

  ‘Forgive me?’

  She closed her legs.

  ‘Unforgiven.’

  ‘I’ll come back one day.’

  ‘No you won’t.’

  I had to build myself a raft in the end. There were able-bodied shipbuilders on the island but none that would help me. She was well liked and had talked to every cunt under the sun. I was abandoning her. I’d used her. I was the betrayer. I was the biggest bastard on Thapsos. Cold looks were the best I got. I got into a few fights as well, collected a few more bruises. She didn’t patch me up this time. I was out of her house by then, sleeping on the beach. It was like old times.

  When the day came, it was one awful exit. A really sad ending, you could say. Even a bad ending. The raft did have a steering oar and a makeshift mast, and a rag of a sail. Apart from that it was a joke. If there had been a sea-god he’d have shaken his white hair and the ocean would have roared with laughter. It fucking roared all right. But no one was laughing.

  Sometimes I feel I could blend into the web, into Penelope’s image of me, even into the events and scenes she wove around me. What’s life, after all, but fact and fiction truly blent? Images of ourselves we accept as accurate, stories we stack up in our heads to barricade reality, combat death, block truth. Why not have it then? A fusion of the two, truth and lies, neither false, neither true. The web exists in space and time. It inhabits its own autonomous world, like a poem or a song. It can free the spirit and lift the heart.

  So the island astern of me – Thapsos, Ogygia, what you will – was lost to sight, and yet once more, O ye laurels of adventure, it was just me and the open sea. A fantastic fucking feeling. The heart-heaviness lightens, blue water all around you, and nowhere, everywhere to go, the universe your compass, your old friends the stars. You can’t explain it to anybody who’s never been a sailor – that enormous sense of being on your own on the ocean, and nothing, absolutely nothing between you and those cold sparklers, the calm constellations, nothing to come between you and the journey, no wars, women, monsters, gods, no complaining crew, while you navigate niftily by those cosmic candles, your night-lights, putting your whole trust in them alone, and the only sound the hiss of the deep giving way to you beneath your probing keel, your pregnant sail, making love to the slinky sea, insatiate, steady under the stars.

  That’s how it was. And there I stood, night after night, an old man alone on the ocean, with only a few planks of poplar poised between me and its upward thrust, its unutterable emptiness and depth. I never once closed my eyes in sleep. I kept them open, unblinking, on the eyes that winked back at me, all night long, always watching the Pleiades and Boötes setting slowly, and always keeping the Great Bear on my left, watching him too as he wheeled about with a wary eye, always observing Orion from a distance, the hunted keeping track of the hunter, and telling me I was headed east, which was all I knew.

  After only a few hours of that, you’re absurdly elevated, as if on drugs, your soul spread out across the skies, like the Milky Way, spermy in space, and you suddenly get it whole again, the night in its silence, the stars in their calm. Hours, days. After seventeen nights of it, you’re more than ready for the next island, you’ve shed the Calypso part of yourself, like a snakeskin, and a new man steps ashore – into the arms of one more woman. Ye gods! But the new man has to be re-born, he has to be washed up, pushed up, fucked up at her feet, kicking and spluttering and coughing up brine, out of the womb, the swinging chains of the sea, after an epic oceanic struggle, reaching land again against the odds.

  The land, sighted on the eighteenth day, was Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians, the supernatural sea-kings, who, if not quite gods, were at least the special friends of the gods. I saw their hills rise up out of the mist, and the coast that jutted out to meet me was like a shield laid out on the sea. Landfall. At last. Thank fuck.

  But Poseidon had other ideas.

  ‘So he thinks it’s going to be that simple, does he?’

  The sea shook with laughter. A great big belly-laugh.

  ‘But his bowels will be full of brine before he boards the next woman. Let him try riding me for the next hour – I’ll show him how I can romp!’

  Trident in hand, he called up the clouds, summoned the winds and struck the sea. A white squall came blasting out of the north, spearheaded by a sea that bore down on me like the toppling towers of Troy. Darkness swooped on the waves. It was the old story, and I was so close to the coast it broke my heart.

  The wall hit me – one puny man against the whole fucking front line. I was swept straight from the raft and rammed hard and fast down the sea’s gullet, so deep I thought I’d never come up again alive. I heard the whole ocean in my head, rumbling, an army dreadful with drums. It seemed a Troy ago till I broke the surface and saw the sky – still raging at me but offering me air, my element. The raft was close by, nearly capsizing; I struggled back on board and clung on as the waves tossed me, a tuft of thistledown blown on the wind at harvest-time.

  And now the lightning ripped the skies. Zeus was joining in, hurling at me like a hundred Hectors. I cursed the day I’d left Calypso. No proud burial-mound for me now, no headland barrow. The fish will feast on me, and then I’ll be fish-shit drifting on the tide, to be chewed at all over again by the tiny life-forms that nibble on the dead detritus of some desolate beach.

  It took a nymph, naturally, to rescue me.

  She was Leucothea, once a woman named Ino, daughter of Cadmus, and now a divinity of the salty depths. The sea is not all heartless and empty of hope. She took pity on me and declared that if Poseidon was deter
mined to throw all the elements at me every time I set sail, it was only right to even things up a little and give me a fighting chance.

  She surfaced and raised herself up a little out of the water, holding on to the raft. Even so close to drowning, I couldn’t help admiring her pert breasts, dripping brine.

  ‘Pay attention. Take this veil, take off all the clothes Calypso gave you, wrap the veil round your waist and swim with it. With this lifebelt, I promise you won’t drown. As soon as you feel the land under your hands and knees, unwrap the veil and throw it away from you, far out into the wine-dark sea. As you do so, avert your eyes, and I’ll be there to catch the veil and take it back with me into the deeps.’

  ‘Why do I have to look away?’ I asked.

  The nymph smiled, her lovely breasts bobbing in the water. There was a small circle of calm round the raft.

  ‘You need to concentrate on survival, not on me. I know you, Odysseus.’

  She handed me the veil, and just in time. Poseidon sucked up a wave like a mountain and sent it curling and hurtling down on me. It smashed the raft to pieces, leaving me with no option but to do as the nymph had said. And, at that point, assistance arrived from no other than Athene. She checked the winds, put them to sleep, and brought up a good strong breeze out of the north to flatten the waves in my path, enabling me to avoid sudden death and swim again for Scheria, this time with the help of the veil. The intervention of nymph and goddess had made it possible.

  But it wasn’t over. Two nights and two more days I struggled in heavy seas, sometimes thinking that in spite of the veil it was all over for me after all. And at the bright-haired dawn on the third day, with the wind falling away and Poseidon tiring of his sport, I finally sighted again the sea-kings’ coast and heard the thunder of surf on its rocks.

  But there was no harbour, only sheer cliffs and sharp ragged reefs like teeth. I couldn’t believe it – how could there be seafarers without a port? Not only that, but I was being swept right at these reefs with the speed of a ship all set to ram another. I cursed and screamed – where were my helpers? – and braced to be flayed alive, broken bones and drowning only seconds away.