* * *
In the hour before dawn Priam finds Achilles on the beach among the crumbling dunes. Achilles is watching the waves rumble in, sigh out; the early light is just bright enough for Priam to see the pile of blackened skulls beside him; farther down the beach are the glowing remnants of a pyre, the sprawled shadows of charred bodies. Achilles picks up a skull and uses his knife to strip off the last scraps of skin and hair as he says, “A hundred, a thousand, a million lives are not, in the balance, Patroclus. Seventy-eight. A hundred, a thousand, a million lives are not, in the balance, Patroclus. Seventy-nine.” In the sand at his feet there lies a dark shape that could be a tall man’s body; there’s light enough to see a sandal on a splayed foot, what could be a horse-hair plume stirring in the dawn breeze, but Priam doesn’t look.
“I have no weapon,” he says.
“Then go and get one,” says Achilles, not looking up. “Or go and get an army, but, regardless, you won’t see another morning.”
“I bear a ransom and hope for mercy,” says Priam, kneeling in the cold sand.
“Stand, Priam,” says Achilles. “You need not be humble here. In death, all are equal.”
Priam says, “My son killed your friend, so you killed my son. Honor is served, and that’s enough. Let it suffice. Take the gold I’ve brought and let me take my son away so the women can wash him for burial.”
“Honor is a line in the sand, drawn by a child, blurring in the wind. I over-stepped it. So what.”
“Honor is how men live. It’s a road in the dark through broken country.”
“Why walk a road when the dark is there, its cold fathomless and welcoming? A hundred, a thousand, a million lives are not, in the balance, Patroclus. Eighty.”
“Does it ease your heart to outrage the dead? Does your lost friend feel closer?”
Silence. Then, “If honor is empty, then what? Why show restraint? Why should I let anyone live?”
“There are laws older than honor. Simple, animal things. A friend dies, and your rage burns white hot, and then it fades. You make their pyre, and send them down into the shadows to the sound of your weeping. You honor their memory, and you hope that it will fade. Sometimes you see them when you sleep.” A pause. “In the end, there are other things: The first light of dawn. The rhythms of the year. A wind touching the sea. A kindness to a broken stranger.”
* * *
In the dust and tumult of the battle no one saw Achilles disappear. Paris claimed to have killed him with an arrow but others said he’d simply vanished. They didn’t find him when they scoured the field in the fading light, but the day had been hard on the fallen with the heat and the horses and the trampling throng. The Greeks mourned him all night, drinking strong wine by the fires that roared on the strand, and no one saw the young man who looked like Patroclus walk away on the inland road.
32
HELEN
Helen was the most beautiful woman. Her beauty sparked wars, though men meant little to her. Her husband was Menelaus, the king of Sparta. By some accounts she never really went to Troy.
It’s time to be seen, someone whispers in my ear, so I walk out onto the balcony overlooking the gulf of evening as it settles over the great square where the world is waiting. It seems everyone in Sparta is crowding the courtyard before the soaring palace with the sheer white walls, and I seem so far above them as they see me and start cheering, every individual voice lost in the inchoate deep-throated roar, and that roar speaks to me, telling me they love me, that they yearn to know me and to know what it is to live in their love and my beauty, and if I could I would tell them it’s like nothing in particular. And then I see not the courtyard but the volume defined by it and the palace and the encircling walls, a cube of empty air floating over the teeming masses as gulls soar through the stray light of the torches, and in that moment I’m outside myself, somewhere in the air, watching a pale woman with pale hair on the balcony lost in the white wall of the palace’s immensity, her hand half-lifted in slight benediction as she looks out into space, and I want to tell the throng that loves her that I hardly know her, that when I look at her in mirrors she stares back at me with contemptuous serenity, and though I have tried to fathom the architecture of her face, the foundation of her power, her marmoreal beauty, the longer I look the less I see anything but a lightness, a blankness, as though she were insubstantial, a shadow in a bank of cloud.
They lead me to my new rooms where the maids are waiting to meet me and as I have always been happiest with other women I want them to like me but they keep their eyes on the floor as I go from each to each and praise her hair or eyes or hands though many are neither fair nor young. I say, “You are all so beautiful!” and this calms them but they’re still too shy to speak to me so I ask questions about their children and about their boyfriends, and to the grandmothers I say I’ve heard they juggle innumerable lovers and how do they manage? They smile a little, and look up for a moment, but it isn’t enough, and they’re relieved when I dismiss them, and when they’ve gone I’ve already forgotten their names, and I sit silently for hours in the empty room as my mind fills with a plangent whiteness.
Then they’re shaking me awake and then I’m standing on a stone floor while the maids pour steaming water over me and then someone is painting my face and when I look in the mirror I see a statue of a coldness and an antiquity that precludes contact with the women and the eunuchs who bustle around me with their eyes downcast. I’m draped in red and white and surrounded by girls in sheer dresses who look like the light of the first day of summer, and then by soldiers of whom I see nothing but their helmets’ gleaming as we pass under the shadow of the gate-house and out through the iron gates and I squint in the sun at the throng in the city. The people scream at the sight of me and throw flowers and some of them try to get near to me, reaching out as though my essence were a contagion that could be spread by touch. It is, I reflect, my wedding day, and I consult myself for the appropriate emotions, whatever apprehension or giddiness or idea of success, but only find myself relieved to be engulfed in this crowd where I know just how to smile, and how, with the most fleeting eye contact, to make the people of the multitude feel seen, and I’m just present enough to manage this transaction, and while this lasts I’m happier because I know who I am and what I’m doing.
Now the crowd is so dense we’re borne along down the wide streets whether we like it or not past the libraries and the shrines and the temple of Nemesis, a hateful goddess whose doors are always locked but now they hang open though no one seems to notice, for they see only me, and I peer within and over the altar there stands a statue and altar and statue are both spattered with blood as from severed arteries, and the statue has my face. I want to stop but the flow is even stronger now and impossible to resist and deep within my silences something is building that I belatedly recognize as a scream and the strangers all around are reaching for me, their hands scrabbling at my face, and I wonder what would happen if the soldiers crumpled and the crowd had its way and for a moment I would welcome this but then we reach the plaza before the temple of Hera and the mass of people opens up. Giddy in the sudden space and silence, I walk up the shallow steps to Menelaus, who is waiting at the top. He is dressed in white linen and carries a golden sword, and he flashes a wide smile with teeth which shows me how much he wants me to like him and to be impressed, and this makes me remember that I no longer know exactly why I chose him from the many essentially equivalent suitors in the first place, and as I’m thinking about this I see his smile weaken.
The echoing interior of the vaulted temple distorts the priestess’s words as Hera’s image glares at me with abiding ill-will and then it’s over, and caparisoned horses take us back toward the palace and as we ride Menelaus won’t look at me but I can see him thinking that this is it, finally, the great thing, and then I’m in my rooms lying naked on linen sheets while he kneels beside me and does what I can only describe as cataloging me, mostly with his hands but sometime
s with his mouth, as though trying to confirm and comprehend my corporeal reality. I try to say something, even to touch him, but it’s as though we are separated by a thick wall of glass and I’m just a shadow moving comically and erratically and perhaps not even noticeably on the other side and in any case he’s still raptly taking me in and my own stillness is such that I can see what he is thinking, which is that it seems impossible that I actually exist and that he has contrived to own me. Later, when he’s working away on top of me, I think of all the other suitors I might have chosen, and how they had said I was like a fire, bright as torches, my skin like sun on water, and how they’d been ready to cut each other’s throats to win me, and later when my bridegroom is gone and I’m in the bath I look at the woman reflected in the still, steaming water and I ask her why she forbore to ignite the war among the suitors that was there for the kindling, for what greater tribute could be imagined to her pride or to her beauty but she only smiles slightly and stares at me in silence and even I can’t look away.
My nights are an endless round of appearances in all the salons and the ballrooms and the colonnades around the gardens, and the chef de protocol directs my motions and even stands behind me and whispers in my ear how kind or cordial or dismissive to be to whatever dignitary or personage, and his instructions become performances, and as I’m stage-managed minutely through every dinner or ball or fête I find myself watching these affairs from a certain distance, emotion moving torpidly across my face when circumstances require a creditable show of feeling, for it isn’t mine to feel but only to be seen, and to be seen to feel, and most of all to shine, and at night the great men who have sworn to ignore me struggle not to stare as I stand in the center of the ballroom while they circulate at a fixed distance, balanced precisely between desire and fear, and it seems I’m the center not just of the party but of Sparta and of all its cities whose lights are constellations revolving around me in the utterly impenetrable and soundless night.
One day I rise at dawn and go onto the balcony over the courtyard and among the receding shadows the red light reveals black writing on the courtyard wall, the letters so large that they’re decipherable even at this distance and I read Helen is a whore and Helen is a trap and Helen is a monster and HELEN IS THE END OF EVERYTHING and as I read I’m laughing.
Not a month after our wedding Menelaus has ceased to call on me and I rarely see him except in court or when I pass the practice fields where he’s always training with his soldiers, as relentless as a young man with no prospects but war, though he’s already rich and a king and past forty. My hair-dresser tells me that they say he’s no Achilles but longs to be, and by dint of long persistence sometimes comes close. I wonder if having had me his pride is sated and he’s done with me for good but then one night there’s a rapping at my door, and I know who it is before I open it and by the way he knocks I know he’s drunk. I feel a frisson of revulsion when he sits on my bed so I stand watching him with my hands folded in front of me willing him to feel my discomfort but in fact he doesn’t notice because he’s thinking.
At last he looks up with a wry face and I think he’s about to tell a joke but he says, “Do you think I’m brave enough?” with a calf-like vulnerability that makes me want to kick him. “Your bravery has so far sufficed,” I say. “Do you think I’m strong enough?” he asks. “Strong enough to stay king, so far, and strong enough to wed me,” I say. “Do you think I’m as great a man as my brother?” he says with an explosive little laugh and I’m distressed to see tears welling in his eyes, and I think of his brother, Agamemnon of the thin hair and the swag belly, my sister Clytemnestra’s husband and a king in his own right, who hasn’t looked at me since my betrothal, and it occurs to me that he’s the only one who really loves my husband. “Great enough for him to stand by you, and they say he’s a great man himself,” I say, at which he sighs deeply and topples onto his side and holds out a hand for me so I go and lie down beside him on my own bed and hold him though its too hot where our skin touches and his sourness taints the air, and as his breathing slows the silence of the room congeals into a high shrill tone that rings in my ears as I regard him coldly and had he opened his eyes and seen me staring he might have taken warning but he stays asleep and I stay there holding him, head propped on my hand, and when the squares of sky are lightening in the windows he rises suddenly as though rushing up out of a bad dream and though he’s ragged with sleep he salutes me with glacial formality and then he’s finally gone.
One night I wake freezing and the bedclothes have become sheets of ice and the walls are too close and so high that the room has become a well and the cold is unbelievable, the worst I’ve ever known, so bitter that I can’t move and I have no choice but to accept it, to let it flow into me until I feel I’ve been absorbed in polar seas and the cold is almost a source of pleasure. I hug my knees to my chest and am achingly awake, my mind roaming emptily, and I know I need to leave but there’s nowhere to go. In my despair I even consider calling on Menelaus, and then I think of the many men I’ve caught looking at me which is almost all of them and I’m aware of their proximity in the palace and in the city but to go to one and scratch on his door and watch his surprise and civil inquiry turn to need and then to slip inside and close the door would be my ruin and, worse, my degradation, and there are no options, and there never will be any options, and then I’m staring at the pale woman in the mirror by my bed as she rises and puts on a black cloak.
I follow her through the palace and out into the city where the streets read as landscape, deep canyons drowned in cold seas, and she passes by the temples and the high houses and then into the lower city where the windows are dark and the doors are gaping mouths and filth clots the gutters and then she’s in the wasteland beyond the wall where outlaws and escaped slaves live in ragged huts or below tarps spread over bushes and there are eyes on her and someone whispers You could die here and then she’s on the bank of a riverbed whose black stones glint in the moonlight and across the channel there’s a bonfire and sitting before it are men’s silhouettes. A trickle of dark water runs in the middle of the channel and the air smells of smoke and the sweetness of garbage as she drops her cloak and pulls off her dress and she’s shivering and I can see the bumps on her skin as she splashes across the water, and her body glows in the moonlight, a white stain on a black land, and they’re waiting for her by the fire, and then I lose her in the dark while I sit on the far bank watching the undulating luminous streaks on the sluggish water.
The days pass, and I lose the days, and the people love me, and I shine, and so it seems it will go forever until the moment I first see Paris. He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, come to court with his brother Hector to strengthen the bonds of friendship between Sparta and Troy, he says, though I have the sense that he just likes to wander. When he’s presented to me I look into his eyes and see a stillness and a distance and a contempt that mirror my own, and when I murmur the usual things what I’m really saying is, Everything you see in me is an illusion, a brilliant surface behind which there is nothing but a slight chill, and then later at the reception I’m standing by a fountain in a courtyard thinking of nothing much at all and then he’s there beside me smiling, and though his manner is a gentleman’s I think he has the soul of a thief and I can see that he is wondering if he can rob us and I take in the beauty and the grace of him and a voice whispers, Yes. Yes, you can.
That night I can’t sleep and get out of bed when the moon goes down and sift through my possessions but find only costly baubles and make-up and all the apparatus of my endless performances and so I go empty-handed through the silent corridors to the guest wing where I find his door open and he’s naked, sitting up in bed, and I can smell him, and over the next hour I wonder if how I feel now is how my old lovers felt and through it all I’m always aware that we are in Menelaus’ place of strength and that fear lends a vibrancy and afterwards I want to fall asleep but he shakes me awake and asks if I will come to Tro
y. Yes, whispers a voice in my ear, and I say, “Yes,” and then we are rushing through the night of the city, and I feel like a child in a story fleeing wicked step-parents, and it’s a long road to the sea but already I feel we’ve escaped all possibility of harm and then I hear the waves breaking and see the ship’s sails black on the stars. Hector is already aboard, waiting with his back to us, and then I’m watching the wake churn as my old life recedes.
The ship sings as we race over the cold sea and there’s a license in our velocity and in the certainty that no one in the world knows where we are. We spend hours in the cabin, and I don’t know what will become of me, and I wonder if the underlying fear is a necessary component of happiness. When we’re resting I talk, as I’ve never really talked to anyone, and I tell him about the need of the crowd and pressure of their eyes and the men who have fallen to me, and how I wished I looked like nothing in particular, and had been no one much, and how I never wanted to be a ghost haunting my own life, and at first I think I must have misheard him when he says, “Eight times. When I’ve had you eight more times that will be enough, and I won’t have to listen anymore.” I laugh tentatively, but he says, “If you don’t try my patience I might not let the sailors have you when I’m done,” and I mean to say something but he smothers me with his mouth.
I have a dream that there’s a woman in the room and she is very beautiful and she’s saying, I’ll be the death of you and I’ll have your eyes from you and I’ll see your pretty face trampled in Troy’s ruin.
I wake that night with Paris sprawled beside me and slip out. On deck I find Hector standing at the prow, immovable as a figurehead, and he is the biggest man I have ever seen, and somehow the calmest. The night is silent but for the wind in the rigging and the shadow of an island looms off the bows, its breakers white on black water. I lay my hand on his wrist and stand so close that my breasts press into his arm and when he looks down at me I expect to see the changes that move through men’s faces when I smile at them but he’s expressionless as I whisper, “Paris has betrayed me. He is a villain, and cares for nothing, and thinks of no one, and just as he’s ruined me he’ll ruin you and your father and your city, if you let him. Menelaus loves his pride more than his life and he’ll die before he’ll let go of me. Do you want to see Troy broken for the sake of your brother’s mistress?” and I feel him waver, for a moment, but he says nothing and then turns his wide back to me, and I might as well be talking to a stone, and I might as well not be there at all, and I walk away and stand by the railing, and now the island is closer on the black sea.
Metamorphica Page 9
