Odysseus: The Return

26

How long did that impenetrable night and that abysmal silence last? Was that my final punishment, a deadly trap that the hostile god had lured me into? To lie immobile for all eternity, alive and conscious, my heart never allowed to sleep? I, who had navigated all the seas, fought against heroes, monsters and storms, against lightning, wind and the screaming sea? Doomed to pass the years, the millennia, counting the beats of my heart? And yet a thread of hope, like a flickering flame, rose from the depths. I was on the continent. Here the blue god, as implacable as he might be, was not so powerful, not more powerful than my goddess. She would hear my heartbeat and she would find me. She would give me back light and strength. Or perhaps she’d send me someone.

I hoped so, intensely. My spirit navigated the night in every direction, searching for a landing place. It expanded like a light mist over an infinite space.

Until the howling of a wolf penetrated into my tomb. It ripped through the silence. Stopped. Growled. Stopped again.

A creaking of hinges.

A footstep descending the stairs.

‘Who are you?’ screamed my heart, but not a sound came out.

The footstep halted.

‘Calchas,’ a voice answered. The footsteps resumed their descent and came to a halt again, next to me. ‘We had a pact.’

Something loosened in my chest, the knot that was holding my voice back lessened its grip.

‘How did you find me?’ I was shaken with sobbing, as though I’d been freed all at once from heavy chains.

‘I was roaming through these mountains and I suddenly felt the beat of your heart vibrating under my feet, from the bowels of the mountain.’

‘My goddess sent you. Only she could bring about such a prodigy.’

I opened my eyes and saw a ray of light penetrating from a slit somewhere above me, glancing off steps cut into the solid rock. The light wounded me like a sword.

‘The time has come for each of us to tell the other when he will face the extreme moment. We both have the gift.’

‘Is that why I can open my eyes and speak?’

‘Yes. . and no. You were hit. Something happened inside you. They gave you up for dead. Still and cold, you were the only one who could hear the beating of your heart. No one else.’

‘I thought I was being put on the pyre alive. .’

‘The goddess inspired other thoughts in Telemachus, and others still in me.’

His face was in the shadows and the light was behind him. But his voice was the same one, deep and dark, that had uttered prophecies in the assembly of the Achaeans when the glorious Atreides had bid him to do so.

‘Get up,’ he said to me.

I tried to get up but my body would not obey me. It had been too long since my muscles had flexed my limbs. Every small movement caused me great pain.

‘How long have I been in this place?’

‘Only the heart counting its beats could tell you. Months. . perhaps. Over this time, something has happened to you.’

‘Is my grandfather Autolykos buried here?’

‘Something has happened to him too.’

It was almost dusk before the pain had ebbed enough to allow me to put my feet on the ground. Calchas dragged me like a dead weight. He pulled at me, braced me, helped me up the stairs. By the time we got to the top it was dark outside. I could breathe!

The moon bathed the peak of Parnassus in liquid silver. A long howl sounded from the fir trees. I trembled.

‘Does that remind you of something?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Now it does. It was a long time ago. . I’m thirsty. . I was a boy. The hero Laertes my father was leading me through the valleys of Arcadia, we were heading towards a mountain.’

Calchas drew some clear water from a spring and filled a cup for me.

‘I heard howling coming from the mountain, coming from the plains. I dreamed. . Can you see what I dreamed? I’m thirsty.’

He gave me more water. Then he stared into my eyes: ‘Oh, Odysseus, brave heart! I see your dream. The man on the carriage pulled by wolves is you.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know. Only you can understand but I don’t think you will before it happens.’

Lightning pulsed behind the trees, distant thunder rumbled in the mountains, the clouds hid the moon.

‘There’s a house here,’ I said. ‘Help me. A storm is coming up.’

I’d understood where I was. A hidden passage had delivered us into a clearing on the forest floor. I could see where Calchas had removed the stones that hid the entrance, so he could descend into my tomb. With his help I reached the house, familiar to me now. The oar from my ship with the engraved butterfly was leaning against the wall. The door was open but the inside was silent. There were embers in the hearth that gave off a slight glow. Calchas added wood.

‘Who lit this fire?’ I asked.

‘I did,’ he answered. ‘Something drove me to come here. This is where I slept last night.’

‘Do you know whose house this is?’

‘I do. It’s the fortress of your grandfather, Autolykos. It was a surprise attack — the place was taken by storm. No one is left.’

‘What about him? Where’s he?’

The thunder sounded closer and closer. The lightning flashed so brightly that it flooded the room we were in and lit up Calchas’ face. He looked like a ghost who had come from the distant past.

‘He’s here. He’s close, but I couldn’t say where. This place has been abandoned for a long time.’

I began to understand why I hadn’t seen Autolykos at the mouth of Hades. I also became suddenly sure that I was being called upon to cross a boundary grimmer and more extreme than the wall of fog. I shivered. I wasn’t sure what was giving me that chill: was it the late hour, the cold wind? My exhausted body that could find no warmth, not even next to the fire? Or was it the fear that was flooding me at the thought of leaving my land, my loved ones, my way of being human, yet again? My heart knew what was coming and I was afraid.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘can you tell me whether Tiresias’ prophecy will come true? Will I be able, at the end of this journey, to return to my family and reign in blessed peace until I grow old?’

‘The prophet spoke to you from Hades itself. But he might have been lying. All of what he predicted will happen, but I can’t say when. I can’t see that.’

‘When do I leave?’

‘As soon as you can. As soon as you can stand on your feet.’

‘Then the time has indeed come for you to tell me, and me to tell you, the day and hour our lives will end.’

‘Yes. Tomorrow morning we will part ways. I’ve fulfilled my mission. Tomorrow at dawn we will speak for the last time.’

I struggled for a long time not to give myself up to sleep, so great was my fear of sinking back into impotence and inertia. But slumber won over and I slept deeply. I saw a myriad of images from my past in my dreams, felt forgotten emotions. And I saw Calchas’ end: the time and the place. I understood why the next day I would be able to whisper that terrible truth into his ear while he told me of my last day on earth.

I heard him a few times during the night, getting up and adding wood to the fire, and I heard the wind shrieking outside, hissing under the roof, whistling through the disjointed hinges and the cracks in the walls. Only once, in the silence, did my grandfather’s voice sound next to me, and it whispered ‘pai’. Then my father’s voice, murmuring other words I could not understand. There was no glimmer of joy in my heart, only infinite melancholy.

A pale sun woke me and I felt strong enough to get up. Calchas had gathered pigeons’ eggs that he found under the roof and he was cooking them in the embers and the warm ash of the hearth. A pleasant warmth had filled the room we slept in. Everything seemed normal: two people who’d just woken up and were rekindling the fire and making breakfast.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked him. It seemed to me that such a simple question might dispel the aura of gloom that weighed upon us.

‘Argus,’ he said, without turning.

‘How did you become involved in the expedition to Troy?’

‘Agamemnon had heard of my ability as a seer and he asked Diomedes to convince me to come. It wasn’t difficult, he was my king.’

‘How did you discover that you had the gift?’

‘When I was six I foresaw my father’s death.’

‘That might have been accidental.’

‘My mother’s as well. I was orphaned in my early adolescence.’

He turned towards me. There was no expression in his eyes or voice.

We ate in silence and then went outside. I didn’t close the door. I wanted the wind, the rain, the snow, to force their way into the ruins of Autolykos’ house and fill it with ghosts. That way the memory of the wanax of Acarnania would survive his passing.

‘There are still many things I would like to ask you,’ I said, ‘but perhaps it is better that each of us go his own way. You freed me from my prison. I will never forget that for as long as I live.’

‘The only way to thank me is to do what we promised each other so long ago in Troy. Come closer.’

As he said this he drew so near me that his cheek was brushing mine. ‘When we touch,’ he said, ‘each one of us will speak into the ear of the other.’

And so it was. A part of me spoke, a part of me listened, in the same moment. I don’t know which of the two was the sadder, more bitter or enigmatic sentence. We both had tears in our eyes when we pulled away from each other. And yet, remaining in my heart and his were dark corners that only one day, perhaps, we would ever understand.

We took leave of one another. He set off towards the sea, leaning on a stick to steady his footing. ‘Farewell,’ I said, ‘great seer.’

‘Farewell,’ he replied, ‘wanax Odysseus, brave heart. I’ll see you again, perhaps, in another life.’

‘Or in another death,’ said I.

I watched as he went off down the path that led to the sea, and for a moment I could see the ghosts that escorted him, bearing shields and gripping spears. Couldn’t he see them? Perhaps, I thought, he could feel their presence. Where were they taking him?

The mortal men who eat bread were just awakening in their cabins scattered throughout the wood. They set about milking their animals, taking the flocks out to pasture.

Only he and I were setting off towards a dark destiny.

I picked up the oar and tried to settle it on my shoulder; it felt terribly heavy, and threw me off balance.

Where was my bow? My arrows? Where was my strength?

‘Here,’ said a voice that sounded at my left, as a cold, familiar chill coursed under my skin. A man’s voice: my grandfather, my father, Mentor, my goddess? They were all present in that voice.

I turned and saw the bow and quiver leaning against the trunk of an age-old oak tree. Had I been dreaming? Perhaps they’d always been there. I was confused, alone and distressed, feeling emotions I’d never felt before. An abyss of solitude, an unearthly chill that nipped at my heart, a trepidation so intense that I would have taken my own life, had I not seen for myself the infinite desolation of Hades and the unhappy souls that inhabited it.

I lifted my bow and nocked an arrow. Before me appeared a roebuck. It was rooted to the spot, staring at me. I killed it and ate meat for two days.

On the third day I started walking, setting off on a long, difficult ascent. Polites’ oar was jolted by every rock I stumbled on, until my shoulder was scraped raw. The sight of my own blood comforted me, showed that I was alive, that there was a hot stream of it coursing through me, under my skin, inside my muscles and my heart. I stayed on the crest of the mountains and headed north. I didn’t want to meet anybody, I didn’t want to be recognized, although I knew that this wasn’t likely to happen in any case.

What should I do? Move as far away from the sea as possible, reach a land where people ate foods that weren’t salted, where an oar could not be identified as what pushes a ship over the waves but instead as what separates the chaff from the wheat. Wheat. . grows in large, fertile plains. But where? I’d only seen such fields in Argolis, certainly no other place in Achaia, but where would I find people who had never seen the sea, never heard of a ship? The sea was everywhere.

I didn’t understand then that thinking was useless, that my mind would never get me to where I wanted to go. All I could do was head in the direction opposite to the sea and keep going. That was all. There was no one, nothing, that could show me the way. Nothing human could guide me. There was no destination. The only thing that sustained me was my faith in myself, the certainty that only I could survive the adversities I would find. Only I could keep love alive in my heart, feel the people I’d lost at my side, never stop believing that at the end of the day I would win.

One day, after having covered an endlessly long tract of land and having watched the sun decline on the horizon, a village appeared in the distance. I had been walking for months without meeting a living soul. I had seen many sunsets, of stunning beauty, and silent auroras over lands which stretched out in a wide expanse before me, where the cold wind in my hair and the light that illuminated every blade of grass aroused forgotten joy in my heart. But never a village.

I decided to enter. I approached slowly. I didn’t know whether I would be greeted by men who respected the gods and the laws of hospitality, or whether there might be a young Nausicaa waiting for me on the banks of a river that flowed glittering over the stones and sand, but I made my way nonetheless through the fields and towards the houses, which had walls made of raw bricks and wood. I longed for mortal company, to prove to myself that I was alive, that the world I walked through was real and not the fruit of a dream.

As I approached, I saw instead, in the distance on my right, a fantastic sight: creatures, galloping wild, that I had heard described by the man who trained me to use weapons, Damastes, but which I had never seen with my own eyes: centaurs!

Had I chanced upon another land of monstrous beings? Had I crossed an invisible limit and entered a territory denied to bread-eating men, without realizing it? I set my oar down on the ground and stood still, watching them as they emerged from the cloud of dust that enveloped them and from the red dazzle of the setting sun. They weren’t centaurs, but two distinct creatures moving like one alone. Men on the backs of horses!

Once they reached the edge of the village, the men jumped agilely to the ground as if they were weightless, giving the animals free rein. I was getting closer myself now. I continued to advance with the long, heavy oar on one shoulder, my bow slung over the other and the quiver at my side. I realized instantly that the attention of the village people and the centaurs, who had just split before my eyes into creatures of diverse natures, was entirely on me.

Where were you, Damastes? Is this what you’d seen in the wavering light of the sunset, in the deep valleys between veils of fog?

A heavy silence fell between myself and them. No one offered a word or made a sound, not even the children, who were holding on tightly to their mothers. My oar, that I held tightly now in my fist, cast a long and very distinct shadow that crossed the clearing at the centre of the village.

They had completely surrounded me and they were observing me, trying to figure out who or what I was. Then one of the centaurs, who seemed the strongest among them, cautiously drew closer. He stopped where the shadow of the oar ended on the ground; it clearly disturbed him. Then he continued slowly towards me, walking up the shadow’s dark path, until we were face to face. He asked me something but I couldn’t understand. He insisted, pointing at the oar, and my heart leaped in my chest. Was this the man that Tiresias had prophesied? The one who would ask me about the object I bore on my shoulder? Had I arrived at my destination? Was it there, at the centre of the village I found myself in, that I would plunge the oar into the ground as an eternal symbol of the last journey of the king of Ithaca? Would I find the victims to be sacrificed among the flocks and herds that these people certainly raised? It hadn’t been such a long journey, and not a dangerous one. Could I already start thinking about returning to Penelope and Telemachus, once and for all?

I couldn’t believe it, and in fact, I shouldn’t have. The man suddenly burst out laughing and wouldn’t stop. He was pointing to the oar and laughing, and I would have liked to kill him to shut him up.

He bent close to the ground using a stick to draw the outline of a ship. He pointed to it with his finger and then at the horizon to his left as though to say: ‘You are seeking the sea and a ship where there are none.’

I didn’t stop in that place. I pushed on without delay and with my heart full of sadness. I had fooled myself into thinking that the gods had remitted the terrible penalty to which I had been condemned. I walked away, dragging the oar behind me and listening to the noise it made hitting the stones of the trail. I saw goats, cows, pigs, and even a stray dog who followed me for a while. With every step, the urge to weep grew stronger. Not because I was afraid of a long journey, or of solitude or danger, but because the world I was crossing was insignificant, desolate and empty. Why had the gods driven me to carry out such a useless journey? Why couldn’t I make the sacrifice they demanded somewhere on my own island, in a place on the coast, in some sanctuary?

Darkness soon caught up with me. I looked for shelter in the hollow of a solitary oak. I gathered up a heap of dried leaves and laid my cloak on top of them. The purple cloak that Penelope had woven for me so that I would feel enveloped by the warmth of her hands and her arms. I tried to sleep.

The village of the centaurs had long vanished behind me, and the night was animated by rustling, furtive movements, growling, clicking, hooting. They would not disturb my slumber, I was accustomed to much worse. It was they, whoever or whatever they were, who would have to fear me.

And yet that thought wasn’t enough to invite sleep. On the contrary. I was thinking that for days and nights I had done nothing but walk, always north and then always east, without ever encountering anything that was worth remembering, nothing that I could recount one day to my son or my subjects or to Phemius the singer. The only time I had stopped, because I’d felt a desire to mix with other human beings, I’d foolishly convinced myself that my quest was over and I’d been ridiculed.

I was thinking that this would be my torture: nothingness, flatness, stillness, the useless spectacle of nature always repeating itself, always the same. Was I becoming immortal? Had I been assigned the endless empty territory stretching out in front of me, as Calypso and Circe had their islands?

Was this the reason — this infinite solitude — that Hercules, after performing the twelve labours, had thrown himself onto the pyre alive?

Everything had been taken from me: my comrades, my ships, my homeland, my father, my wife and son after I had rejoined them. My house. Must not this, what I was experiencing, be the threshold of immortality? I hadn’t asked for it. I’d refused it when it was offered to me on the island at the ends of the earth. I had defied the mouth of Hades to find my future! And I would not allow that endeavour to prove itself futile.

I was sleeping, or perhaps I was in that half-asleep state where dreams and reality are blurred, when I heard a grunting. A sound I recognized: a bear. How could I defend myself? I didn’t have a heavy weapon with me and it was dark. I couldn’t climb the tree I was using for shelter, because it had been struck by lightning at a short distance from the ground. If I tried to run, over open ground, the animal would catch me instantly. All I had was my dagger. I would fight with that, and almost certainly be killed. I prayed in my deepest heart to my goddess, invoked the shadow of my father, the spirit of my mother and the dark power of Autolykos wanax of Acarnania, because I wanted to see my struggle through to the end.

Someone surely listened to me. When I could already sense the bear’s breath close to my face, hear its claws ripping at the dry trunk, I heard the barking of a dog, soon joined by five, ten or even more, and then the growls and snarls and howls of a ferocious fight. Until everything trailed off into silence. Only the penetrating, acrid stench of the beast lingered in the air to remind me that it hadn’t been a dream. Then I fell asleep, certain that nothing would disturb me before the dawn.