Odysseus: The Return Read online

  The dawn was not hindered by any obstacle: no mountains, no cliffs. The light rose like a powerful breath: uninterrupted, diffuse, the colour of water. Then that infinite land awoke: flocks of thousands of birds flew into the breaching sun, the galloping of vast herds made the ground tremble beneath our feet. Even our gods felt very small and far away.

  On their tracks again, we continued our long march until we came upon a line of low, rolling hills. Once we reached the top, we realized that we had arrived.

  Below us a wide green valley with a small lake at its centre was surrounded by thousands of palm trees. At the valley’s edges were vast fields of crops and plots of land densely planted with flowers as red and fleshy as fruits. In the distance were hills of sand that looked like mounds of gold dust. Houses stood here and there, shacks covered with bundles of dried grasses. Ropes made of braided grass were rolled into coils at the edges of the fields. Children swam in the lake and splendid dark-skinned women walked by completely naked, with high hips and slender legs.

  Almost all of the men were assembled at a vast space at the side of the village, grouped around a red stone monolith. They were playing instruments, flutes and drums, and singing.

  And there were our comrades.

  ‘What shall we do?’ asked Eurylochus, who never left my side. ‘I say we attack. We’re slightly outnumbered but we’re well armed and they’re not. If they have weapons, they’ll be inside their houses. We’ll free our men and return to the ships.’

  ‘No. There’s no need for arms,’ I replied. ‘We’ll leave our shields hanging on our backs, as they are now, our swords in their sheaths and the spears pointed downward. The most difficult thing will be to convince, or force, our men to leave.’

  Eurylochus nodded and we made our way down the hill. We were noticed almost immediately because there were so many of us, a small army, but no one seemed frightened. They only stopped singing. We were careful to show no signs that we intended to use force against them.

  I smiled and bowed towards them, turning to seek out the one who might be their chief. Then I greeted my own: ‘Hail, men.’

  ‘Hail, Odysseus,’ they replied. They were calling me by name as if I were one of them, an equal.

  ‘We found your ships empty and abandoned. We imagined that you were carried off by force and we came searching for you, but I can see that’s not what happened.’

  ‘No,’ one of them admitted. ‘We weren’t dragged off by force. They convinced us.’

  ‘They don’t seem to speak our language,’ I observed.

  ‘We had no problems understanding them,’ said another.

  ‘How?’

  He took one of those red flowers from a basket: ‘Taste this and you’ll understand.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m glad that no ill has befallen you. We’ll go back to the ships now and return home.’

  ‘Have you taken a look around, king of Ithaca? Have you seen the grasslands, the animals and birds, the sunsets and dawns? Have you noticed that no one carries weapons? Do you know why? Because there’s nothing to steal or plunder. Food is abundant – there’s enough for everyone. The women are beautiful and skilled in the arts of love and the children belong to everybody; they swim and play in the lake, run happily in the fields. The men sing and dance and tell stories every night. Stories which we’ll learn to understand in time . . . That’s another thing there’s an abundance of here. See? Everyone has time here. It’s never too early and never too late. You can sleep by day and stay up all night with one of these radiant beauties, the colour of burnished bronze.’

  ‘What about your wives? The girls who’ve been waiting for you all these years? Your children, who were still babbling when you left them. Why aren’t you thinking of them?’

  ‘We’re dead for them, Odysseus. Dead, understand? The girls we were betrothed to will have found other husbands, our children were too young then to remember us now; it’s as if we never existed for them . . . For ten years we’ve gone into combat almost every day. We’ve done nothing but kill, wound, slaughter. Our hands are soaked with blood and the screams of the dying never leave our ears . . .

  ‘Is it easy for you to sleep at night, brave, cunning Odysseus? Well, it wasn’t for me. I couldn’t sleep. I was surrounded by ghosts, shrieking spirits. They bit away at my heart.’

  He held out the flower to me again. ‘With this you forget everything, understand? Everything.’

  ‘Even our homeland?’ I challenged him. ‘Her fragrance? Her forests and sea?’

  ‘Certainly! That as well. Do you really think that after having lived as we did for as long as we did, we can return home as if nothing had ever happened? Hoping to find that nothing has changed? Return to what? To our women, who will have gone off with someone else? To our parents who’ve grown old waiting for us? To our children, who won’t recognize us? Do you think that the blood and carnage of our nightmares won’t find us there?

  ‘Our land is here, Odysseus, where we’ve found peace and oblivion. Oblivion, king of Ithaca, understand? Oblivion . . .’

  ‘Burn the ships,’ said another, ‘and join us here. We’ll be happy together, and together we can forget.’

  I drew my most trusted men aside. ‘They’re under the effects of a powerful drug,’ I said. ‘How else could they forget their homes, their parents, their children and their wives? We have to get them away from here at any cost, as quickly as we can. The others, back at the ships, will already be worried about us.’

  ‘It won’t be easy,’ said Antiphus. ‘There are so many of them and they seem set on staying.’

  ‘I’ve seen many coils of rope made with dry grasses. We’ll use it to tie them up, one by one, and we’ll drag them back if we have to. As soon as the effect of the drug contained in those cursed flowers wears off, they’ll go back to being themselves again, you’ll see.’

  We waited until night fell, when everyone had lain down to rest. Our comrades, who had no homes to go to, were stretched out on mats near the fire, and this made our task much easier.

  ‘Let’s wait a little longer,’ I said. ‘They’ve eaten many of those flowers. If we wait for them to take effect, the men will be deeply asleep.’

  When their breathing became heavy and they all seemed to have fallen into a dead slumber, I signalled to my men and we began, swift and quiet as ghosts, to tie their hands behind their backs, ring the rope around their necks and then fetter them one to another.

  One of them awoke and cried out: ‘What are you doing? No! No! We don’t want to go. Leave us here!’ He tried to rouse the others: ‘Wake up! Wake up! They’re taking us away!’ But by this time they were all tied up and we began to drag them away from the clearing. We’d done a good job, but nonetheless I had twenty armed warriors draw up on either side of the column. Those posted at the front drove them forward and others made sure that no one escaped at the rear.

  As we began to climb the hill, we saw the dark-skinned inhabitants of that land leave their shacks to watch what was happening. The moon shed a bright glow and we were all clearly visible to them, and they to us. They did not try to come closer. Our bronze armour glittered in the light of the moon. They stayed where they were but they began to sing. A long, sad lament with two different tones: the subtle, clear voices of the women and the deeper, more intense ones of the men. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. Perhaps that was their way of saying goodbye to the men to whom they’d offered hospitality in such a magic and marvellous way, in their boundless, timeless land. They watched them being dragged away like animals snared in nooses and they wept for them. Their song became shriller and more penetrating, like a funeral wail for people who were going to their deaths. That’s what I heard, and so did my comrades, walking silently with their spears in hand and their shields on their arms. The others, stumbling along with their wrists and necks bound, seemed to understand the meaning of those voices and when any of them raised their faces to look at me I saw them streaked with tears.
/>   We walked all night without ever stopping and all the next day, resting only to regain our strength and drink. We never said a word to our unhappy comrades nor did they ever speak to us, but I could see that they were beginning to look reality in the face again and that they were bitterly bemoaning what they had lost.

  3

  I HAD TO LASH THE MEN we’d saved to the oars and to the rowing benches, and I put my most loyal comrades in command of the ships we had found abandoned: Eurylochus, Euribates, Antiphus and a few others, all armed to the teeth. Then I gave the signal to set sail.

  I didn’t want to linger a moment longer in that place. The fascination of that mysterious and magnificent land had wormed into my own heart and I wanted to stop any of the other men from becoming ensnared in the tantalizing world of the flower-eaters. My desire to return home was what was keeping me alive. I would not give up trying for any reason in the world, nor would I allow my men to give up. I was the one responsible for their lives and their futures. I was duty-bound to bring them back to their parents, who were surely wasting away as they tried to keep alive the feeble hope of seeing their sons again. I had taken these men to war and I had already lost too many of them on the bloody fields of Troy; I could not lose any more on our return journey.

  I often asked myself whether news of the fall of Troy had reached the land of Achaia. Some of the warriors had certainly made their return. Had the news flown from Pylos to the shores of Ithaca and the rooms of my palace, raising the hopes of Penelope and my son Telemachus? Were they waiting, watching? Wait for me, I beg of you, wait for me! I’ll come back, as I swore I would when I left, to you, my bride, and to you, my son.

  The wind was driving us elsewhere. Where, I couldn’t say. The sun seemed to perch at the centre of the sky for an endless time, only to dive like a flaming meteor into the horizon. The night stars seldom sparkled, often hiding behind the clouds, and it seemed more difficult every day to get our bearings.

  I tried to inspire the confidence of my comrades. I wanted them to believe that I knew which direction we were sailing in, but the sea just became wider and more deserted day after day. I realized that since the storm had driven us away from Cape Malea, we hadn’t ever encountered another ship, not even a fisherman’s boat. The world had changed. I couldn’t recognize the sky and the sea and they didn’t recognize me. My goddess wasn’t speaking to me, never appeared to me. Perhaps her gaze hadn’t been able to penetrate the wall of fog that separated our world from the one we’d found: a world so unlike our own, peopled by pure, innocent, unarmed men.

  We sailed all that day and the next. After the sun had set, we prudently hauled up the sail halfway, as the lookouts at the bow searched for a landing place while scanning the darkness for possible hazards or traps. We didn’t want to spend the night at sea. The moon, which had been guiding us, hid behind the clouds and a thick fog enveloped us. There was no light anywhere. We lit some torches, using the braziers, and tried to lighten the choppy surface of the sea. I ordered my men to haul the sails in completely and to proceed with the oars. We called out to one another, from one ship to the next, so we could stay in touch and not lose heart. Then, all at once, the sea flattened in front of us.

  ‘Look! We’ve entered a sheltered place,’ I said to Eurylochus. ‘Behind us you can hear the sound of the waves breaking, but it’s smooth as oil in front.’

  ‘A natural harbour of some sort. Can you see anything?’

  ‘No.’

  The torch I was holding went out, but we continued on slowly in the thick fog and absolute darkness until the ship’s keel grazed the low, sandy ground of a beach. A god had guided us there: there was no other explanation.

  ‘Come forward,’ I shouted to the other ships following ours. ‘We’ve found land!’

  One after another, the ships were brought ashore, bows scraping the beach. The men laid their cloaks out on the sand and fell asleep. The air had changed; it was warmer now, and not so humid. The clouds had thinned out and the dim light of the sky revealed low, dark hills. The place seemed uninhabited. I untied the comrades who we’d rescued from the land of the flower-eaters.

  I spoke to them. ‘I had to do what I did because you weren’t yourselves any more. You seemed to have lost your minds. I am responsible for your lives. We’ve lost too many comrades already. I could not find it in my heart to tell your parents that you had refused to return, uncaring of their pain.’ There was no answer from them. Their dark silence made my heart ache. They were acting as if they’d lost the only good thing remaining in their lives. But everything was strange that night: the fog, the darkness, the sounds . . . Later we heard distant cries, hoarse growling, like hungry lions roaming in the blackest night, but different in some way, almost human. None of us had ever heard anything like it before.

  We awoke when Aurora rose to illuminate sea and land. I looked around: my comrades were getting up, one after another, gathering together, speaking to each other. There were still a great many of us; we were still an army. With the light everything looked different, more natural, and I realized that we were beached on a low island, fertile, but not cultivated. There were a great number of wild goats and the vegetation was abundant.

  I walked all the way around the coast and saw that the mainland was close. It was vast, covered with luxuriant bushes and trees. I ordered my comrades to take their bows and arrows and to hunt goats on the island. I would go to the mainland with the crew of my ship.

  The men tried to dissuade me. They asked me to wait until we had feasted on meat roasted over the embers, and the strong red wine that still filled our jars. But my desire to explore the vast, unknown land before us was greater than any hunger. I wondered who inhabited it: were they men who respected the law and feared the gods, or violent, ferocious savages who only obeyed those stronger than they were? Even if we were to meet up with the latter, I was not worried about any danger. The night before I’d fallen asleep thinking of Penelope, of my parents and my son, trying to imagine what he might look like now. I had not been at all frightened by the dark, moonless night, the unfamiliar, fog-covered land. Every sound, every smell, every stone on that island roused my curiosity. It made me realize how great the world was, how much the gods of the origins had created and how little we knew. How much I could have learned in ten years, if I hadn’t spent them fighting under the walls of Troy, breathing in nothing but dust and the stench of blood in that thin strip between city and sea!

  I set sail in the afternoon with my crew after we had prepared and loaded the ship. I left Eurylochus in command of the others, who would wait on the island for our return. I brought some of the men who had been among the flower-eaters with me, hoping that activity, and perhaps a bit of adventure, would shake them out of their lethargy. We pushed off and crossed the strait that separated us from the mainland. As we approached, we could see that the land was rich with vegetation but there were no traces of villages or even houses. The only feature of note was a cave, half hidden by trees and bushes, near a promontory.

  We went ashore at a small bay that lay beneath a high cliff, nearly a mountain. We took a skin of wine with us to offer to the inhabitants of that land, if there were any to be found, in order to win their favour. The buzzing of the cicadas was the only noise to be heard. We found no other boats, no nets. There were no leafy shelters to protect us from the summer sun, the winter rain or wild animals. Sometimes I still ask myself whether I really lived that adventure; whether I felt what I felt and saw what I saw . . . We spotted some grapevines, but they were wild as well, with clusters of big, hard, sour grapes. One of the men who had scouted forward reported that he had found a dirt path. We followed him. This is the way that the story returns to my mind every time. It is thus that the images infest my dreams, forcing me to wake up soaked in cold sweat.

  We arrived at the entrance to the cave that we’d seen from the sea. And here we finally saw signs of human life: the space inside was divided into pens which held lambs and goats. Eve
rywhere there were big wheels of cheese resting on drying racks to age. But all the objects were enormous in size: the jars full of curdled milk and whey, the axes for chopping down trees . . . Who could be living in such a place? No sooner had my comrades taken a look around than they became spooked and insisted that we grab anything that was worth taking and run back to the ship. But it was too late.

  We heard the bleating of a big flock and a footstep so heavy it made the earth quake. A pile of long tree trunks was dumped through the opening to the cave as if it were a bundle of sticks. Wood for the fire. I could see the panic on my comrades’ faces. At the door to the cave stood a hulking black shape without features or expression. A giant.

  We dashed to the deep recesses of the cave, looking for a place to hide, but it wasn’t long before the lord of that dreadful place decided to light a fire. The flames blazed up, illuminating the entire space, and it was impossible to stay hidden. But even more impossible to stay still. The monster noticed some of us moving, and with a sort of roar (was that the bellowing voice we’d heard the night before on the island?) asked us: ‘Who are you, foreigners? Sailors or pirates? Where is your ship?’ I was in a peculiar state, of understanding with different ears and seeing with different eyes, in which one of a myriad of possible realities becomes the only one in a mere instant and excludes all the others. Terror gripped me because the light had made his face visible now as well. He had a single eye beneath his brow which glowed like an ember but stared fixedly in a vacuous way. His hair was long, bristly and uncombed, his chest was enormous and his arms shaggy, his bare feet were caked with the dung of sheep and goats. He let off an intolerable stench.