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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781550961232 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Exile Editions |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2009 |
| Series: | Exile Classics series |
| Edition description: | Revised ed. |
| Pages: | 138 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
HELEN
A POEM BY YANNIS RITSOS
Translated by Gwendolyn MacEwen and Nikos Tsingos
(Even from a distance the wear and tear showed – crumbling walls with fallen plaster; faded window-shutters; the balcony railings rusted. A curtain stirring outside the window on the upper floor, yellowed, frayed at the bottom. When he approached – hesitantly – he found the same sense of desolation in the garden: disorderly plants, voluptuous leaves, unpruned trees; the odd flower choked in the nettles; the waterless fountains, mouldy; lichen on the beautiful statues. An immobile lizard between the breasts of a young Aphrodite, basking in the last rays of the setting sun. How many years had passed! He was so young then – twenty-two? twenty-three? And she? You could never tell – she radiated so much light, it blinded you; it pierced you through – you couldn't tell anymore what she was, if she was, if you were. He rang the doorbell. Standing in the place he once knew so well, now so strangely changed with its unknown entanglement of dark colours, he heard the sound of the bell ringing, solitary. They were slow to answer the door. Someone peered out from the upper window. It wasn't her. A servant, very young. Apparently laughing. She left the window. Still no answer at the door. Afterwards footsteps were heard inside on the stairway. Someone unlocked the door. He went up. A smell of dust, rotten fruit, dried-up slop, urine. Over here. Bedroom. Wardrobe. Metal mirror. Two tottering carved armchairs. A small cheap tin table with coffee cups and cigarette butts. And she? No, no, impossible? An old, old woman – one, two hundred years old! But five years ago – oh no! The bedsheet full of holes. There, unstirring; sitting on the bed; bent over. Only her eyes – larger than ever, autocratic, penetrating, vacant.)
Yes, yes – it's me. Sit down for a while. Nobody comes around anymore. I'm starting to forget how to use words. Anyway, words don't matter. I think summer's coming, the curtains are stirring differently – they're – trying to say something – such stupidities! One of them has already flown out of the window, straining to break the rings, to fly over the trees – maybe as well to haul the whole house away – but the house resists with all corners and me along with it, despite the fact that I've felt for months, liberated from my dead ones, my own self, and this resistance of mine, incomprehensible, beyond my will, strange to me, is all I possess – my wedlock with this bed, this curtain – is also my fear, as though my whole body were sustained by the ring with the black stone I wear on my forefinger
Now, I examine this stone very closely in these endless hours of night – it's black, it has no reflections – it grows, it grows, it fills up with black waters – the waters overflow, swell; I sink, not to the bottom, but to an upper depth; from up there I can make out my room down below, myself, the wardrobe, the servants quibbling voicelessly; I see one of them perched on a stool and with a hard, spiteful expression, polishing the photograph of Leda; I see the duster leaving behind a trail of dust and delicate bubbles which rise and burst with quiet murmuring all around my ankle-bones or knees.
I notice you also have a perplexed, dumbfounded face, distorted by the slow undulations of black water – now widening, now lengthening your face with yellow streaks. Your hair's writhing upwards like an upside down Medusa. But then I say: it's only a stone, a small precious stone. All the blackness contracts, then dries up and localizes in the smallest possible knot – I feel it here, just under my throat. And I'm back again in my room, on my bed, beside my familiar phials which stare at me, one by one, nodding – only they can help me for insomnia, fear, memories, forgetfulness, asthma.
What are you up to? Still in the army? Be careful. Don't distress yourself so much about heroism, honours and glories. What'll you do with them? Do you still have that shield on which you had my face engraved? You were so funny in your tall helmet with its long tail – so very young, and shy, as though you'd concealed your handsome face between the hind legs of a horse whose tail hung all the way down your bare back. Don't get mad again. Stay awhile longer.
The time of antagonism is over now; desires have dried up; perhaps now, together, we can observe the same point of futility – where, I think, the only true encounters are realized – however indifferent, but nonetheless soothing – our new community, bleak, quiet, empty, without much displacement or opposition – let's just stir the ashes of the fireplace, making now and again long thin lovely burial urns or sit down on the ground and beat it with soundless palms.
Little by little things lost their meaning, became empty; did they ever perhaps mean anything? – slack, hollow; we stuffed them with straw and chaff, to give them form, let them thicken, solidify, stand firmly – the tables, chairs, the bed we lay on, the words; always hollow like the cloth sacks, the vendors' burlap bags; from the outside you can already make out what's inside them, potatoes, onions, wheat, corn, almonds, or flour.
Sometimes one of them catches on a nail on the stair or on the prong of an anchor down in the harbour, it rips open, the flour spills out – a foolish river. The bag empties itself. The poor gather up the flour in handfuls to make some pies or gruel. The bag collapses. Someone picks it up from its two bottom ends; shakes it out in the air; a cloud of white dust enfolds him; his hair turns white; especially his eyebrows turn white. The others watch him. They don't understand a thing; they wait for him to open his mouth, to say something. He doesn't. He folds up the bag into four sections; he leaves as he is, white, inexplicable, wordless, as though disguised as a lewd naked man covered with a sheet, or like a cunning dead man resurrected in his shroud.
So, events and things don't have any meaning – the same goes for words, although with words we name, more or less, those things we lack, or which we've never seen – airy, as we say, eternal things – innocent words, misleading, consoling, equivocal, always trying to be correct – what a terrible thing, to have named a shadow, invoking it at night in bed with the sheet pulled up to your neck, and hearing it, we fools think that we're holding our bodies together, that they're holding us, that we're keeping our hold on the world.
Nowadays I forget the names I knew best or get them all mixed up – Paris, Menelaus, Achilles, Proteus, Theoklymenos, Tefkros, Castor and Polydeuces – my moralizing brothers; who, I gather have turned into stars – so they say – pilot-lights for ships – Theseus, Pireitheus, Andromache, Cassandra, Agamemnon – sounds, only formless sounds, their images unwritten on a window-pane or a metal mirror or on the shallows of a beach, like that time on a quiet sunny day, with myriads of masts, after the battle had abated, and the creaking of the wet ropes on the pulleys hauled the world up high, like the knot of a sob arrested in a crystalline throat – you could see it sparkling, trembling without becoming a scream, and suddenly the entire landscape, the ships, the sailors and the chariots, were sinking into light and anonymity.
Now, another deeper, darker submersion – out of which some sounds emerge now and then – when hammers were pounding wood and nailing together a new trireme in a small shipyard; when a huge four-horse chariot was passing by on the stone road, adding to the ticks from the cathedral clock in another duration, as though there were more, much more than twelve hours and the horses were turning around in the clock until they were exhausted; or when one night two handsome young men were singing below my windows a song for me, without words – one of them one-eyed; the other wearing a huge buckle on his belt – gleaming in the moonlight.
Words don't come to me on their own now – I search them out as though I'm translating from a language I don't know – nevertheless, I do translate. Between the words, and within them, are deep holes; I peer through them as though I'm peering through the knots which have fallen from the boards of a door completely closed up, nailed here for ages. I don't see a thing. No more words or names; I can only single out some sounds – a silver candlestick or a crystal vase rings by itself and all of a sudden stops, pretending it knows nothing, that it didn't ring, that nobody struck it, or passed by it. A dress collapses softly from the chair onto the floor, diverting attention from the previous sound to the simplicity of nothing. However the idea of a silent conspiracy, although diffused in air, floats densely higher up, almost immeasurable, so that you feel the etching of the lines around your mouth grow deeper precisely because of this presence of an intruder who takes over your position turning you into an intruder, right here on your own bed, in your own room.
Oh, to be alienated in our very clothes which get old, in our own skin which gets wrinkled; while our fingers can no longer grip or even wrap around our bodies the blanket which rises by itself, disperses, disappears, leaving us bare before the void. Then, the guitar hanging on the wall with its rusty strings, forgotten for years, begins to quiver like the jaw of an old woman quivering from cold or fear, and you have to put your palm flat upon the strings to stop the contagious chill. But you can't find your hand, you don't have one; and you hear in your guts that it's your own jaw that's shaking.
In this house the air's become heavy and inexplicable, maybe due to the natural presence of the dead. A trunk opens on its own, old dresses fall out, rustle, stand up straight and quietly stroll around; two gold tassels remain on the carpet; a curtain opens – revealing nobody – but they're still there; a cigarette burns on and off in the ashtray; the person who left it there is in the other room, rather awkward, his back turned, gazing at the wall, possibly at a spider or a damp stain, facing the wall, so the dark hollow under his protruding cheekbones won't show.
The dead feel no pain for us any more – that's odd, isn't it? – not so much for them as for us – that neutral intimacy of theirs within a place which has rejected them and where they don't contribute a thing to the upkeep, nor concern themselves with the run-down condition, them, accomplished and unchangeable, and yet seeming somewhat larger.
This is what sometimes confounds us – the augmentation of the unchangeable and their silent self-sufficiency – not at all haughty; they don't try to force you to remember them, to be pleasing. The women let their bellies slacken; their stockings sagging, they take the pins from the silver box; they stick them in the sofa's velvet one by one, in two straight rows; then pick them up and begin again with the same polite attention. Someone who's very tall emerges from the hall – he knocks his head against the door; he doesn't make a single grimace – and neither could the knock be heard at all.
Yes, they're as foolish as we; only quieter. Another of them raises his arm ceremoniously, as though to give a blessing to someone, pulls off a piece of the crystal from the chandelier, puts it in his mouth simply, like glass fruit – you think he's going to chew it, to get a human function in motion again – but no; he clenches it between his teeth, thus, to let the crystal shine with a futile brightness. A woman takes some face-cream from the little round white jar with a skilled movement of two of her fingers, and writes two thick capital letters on the windowpane – they look like L and D – the sun heats the glass pane, the cream melts, drips down the wall – and all this means nothing – just two greasy, brief furrows.
I don't know why the dead stay around here without anyone's sympathy; I don't know what they want wandering around the rooms in their best clothes, their best shoes polished, immaculate, yet noiselessly as though they never touch the floor. They take up space, sprawl wherever they like, in the two rocking chairs, down on the floor, or in the bathroom; they forget and leave the tap dripping; forget the perfumed bars of soap melting in the water. The servants passing among them, sweeping with the big broom, don't notice them. Only sometimes, the laughter of a maid somewhat confined – it doesn't fly up, out of the window, it's like a bird tied by the leg with a string, which someone is pulling downward.
Then the servants get inexplicably furious with me, they throw the broom here, right into the middle of my room, and go into the kitchen; I hear them making coffee in big briquets, spilling the sugar on the floor – it crunches under their shoes; the aroma of the coffee drifts through the hallway, floods the house, observes itself in the mirror like a silly, dark, impudent face covered with uncombed tufts of hair and two false skyblue earrings, blows its breath on the mirror, clouds the glass. I feel my tongue probing around in my mouth; I feel that I've still got some saliva. 'A coffee for me too,' – I call to the servants; 'a coffee,' (that's all I ask for; I don't want anything else). They act as though they don't hear. I call over and over again without bitterness or rage. They don't answer. I hear them gulping down their coffee from my porcelain cups with the gold brims and the delicate violet flowers. I become silent and gaze at that broom flung on the floor like the rigid corpse of that tall, slim young grocer's boy, who, years ago, showed me his big phallus between the railings of the garden gate.
Oh yes, I laugh sometimes, and I hear my hoarse laughter rise up, no longer from the chest, but much deeper, from the feet; even deeper, from the earth. I laugh. How pointless it all was, how purposeless, ephemeral and insubstantial – riches, wars, glories, jealousies, jewels, my own beauty. What foolish legends, swans and Troys and loves and brave deeds. I met my old lovers again in mournful night feasts, with white beards, with white hair, with bulging bellies, as though they were already pregnant with their death, devouring with a strange craving the roasted goats, without looking into a shoulder-blade – what should they look for? – a level shadow filled all of it with a few white specks. I, as you know, preserved my former beauty as if by miracle (but also with tints, herbs and salves, lemon juice and cucumber water). I was only terrified to see in their faces the passing also of my own years. At that time I was tightening my belly muscles, I was tightening my cheeks with a false smile, as though propping up two crumbling wall with a thin beam.
That's how I was, shut in, confined, strained – God, what exhaustion – confined every moment (even in my sleep) as though I were inside freezing armour or a wooden corset around my whole body, or within my own Trojan Horse, deceptive and narrow, knowing even then the pointlessness of deceit and self-deception, the pointlessness of fame, the pointlessness and temporality of every victory. A few months ago, when I lost my husband (was it months or years?), I left my Trojan Horse forever down in the stable, with his old horses, so the scorpions and spiders could circle around inside him. I don't tint my hair anymore.
Huge warts have sprouted on my face. Thick hairs have grown around my mouth – I clutch them; I don't look at myself in the mirror – long, wild hairs – as though someone else has enthroned himself within me, an impudent, malevolent man, and it's his beard that emerges from my skin. I leave him be – what can I do? – I'm afraid that if I chased him away, he'd drag me along behind him.
Don't go away. Stay awhile longer. I haven't talked for ages. Nobody comes to see me anymore. They were all in a hurry to leave, I saw it in their eyes – all in a hurry for me to die. Time doesn't roll on. The servants loathe me. I hear them opening my drawers at night, taking the lacy things, the jewels, the gold coins; who can tell if they'll leave me with a single decent dress for some necessary hour or a single pair of shoes. They even took my keys from under my pillow; I didn't stir at all; I pretended I was asleep – they would have taken them one day anyway – I don't want them to know, at least, that I know.
What would I do without even them? 'Patience, patience,' I tell myself; 'patience' – and this too is the smallest form of victory, when they read the old letters of my admirers or the poems great poets dedicated to me; they read them with idiotic bombast and many mistakes in pronunciation, accentuation, metre and syllabification – I don't correct them. I pretend I don't hear. Occasionally they draw big moustaches with my black eyebrow pencil on my statues, or stick an ancient helmet or a chamber-pot on their heads. I regard them coolly. They get angry.
One day, when I felt a little better, I asked them again to make up my face. They did. I asked for a mirror. They had painted my face green, with a black mouth. 'Thank you,' I told them, as though I hadn't seen anything strange. They were laughing. One of them stripped right in front of me, put on my gold veils, and like that, bare-legged with her thick legs began to dance, leapt upon the table – frenzied; danced and danced, bowing in imitation, as it were, of my old gestures. High up on her thigh she had a love-bite from a man's strong even teeth. I watched them as though I were in the theatre – with no humiliation or grief, or indignation – for what purpose? – But I kept telling myself: 'One day we'll die,' or rather: 'One day you will,' and that was a sure revenge, fear and consolation. I looked everything straight in the eye with an indescribable, apathetic clarity, as if my eyes were independent of me; I looked at my own eyes situated a metre away from my face, like the panes of a window far removed, from behind which someone else sits and observes the goings-on in an unknown street with closed coffee, photograph and perfume shops, and I had the feeling that a beautiful crystal phial broke, and the perfume spilled out in the dusty showcase. Everyone passing, pausing vaguely, sniffing the air, remembered something good and then disappeared behind the pepper-trees or at the end of the street.
Now and again, I can still sense that aroma – I mean, I remember it; isn't it strange? – those things we usually consider great, dissolve, fade away – Agamemnon's murder, the slaughter of Clytemnestra (they'd sent me one of her beautiful necklaces from Mycenae, made from small gold masks, held together by links from the upper tips of their ears – I never wore it). They're forgotten; some other things remain, unimportant, meaningless things; I recall seeing one day a bird perching on a horse's back; and that baffling thing seemed to explain (especially for me) a certain beautiful mystery.
I still remember, as a child, on the banks of the Eurotas, beside the burning leanders, the sound of a tree peeling off alone; the bark falling gently into the water and floating away like triremes, and I waited, stubbornly, for a black butterfly with orange stripes to land on a piece of bark, amazed that although it was immobile, it moved, and this broke me up, that butterflies, although adept in air, know nothing about travelling in water, or rowing. And it came.
There are certain strange, isolated moments, almost funny. A man takes a stroll at midday wearing a huge hamper on his head; the basket hides his whole face as though he were headless or disguised by an enormous eyeless, multi-eyed head. Another man, strolling along, musing in the dusk, stumbles over something, curses, turns back, searches – finds a pebble, picks it up; kisses it; then remembers to look around; goes off guiltily. A woman slips her hand inside her pocket; finds nothing; takes her hand out, raises it and carefully scrutinizes it, as though it were breathed on by the powder of emptiness.
A waiter's caught a fly in his hand – he doesn't crush it; a customer calls him; he's absorbed; he loosens his fist; the fly escapes and lands on the glass. A piece of paper rolls down the street hesitantly, spasmodically, attracting nobody's attention – enjoying it all. But yet, every so often it gives off a certain crackle which belies it; as though looking for an impartial witness to its humble, secret route. And all these things have a desolate and inexplicable beauty, and a profound pain because of our own odd and unknown gestures – don't they?
The rest is lost as though it were nothing. Argos, Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Sikion – shadows of names. I utter them; they re-echo as though they're sinking into the incomplete. A well-bred lost dog stands in front of the window of a cheap dairy. A young girl passing by looks at it; it doesn't respond; its shadow spreads wide in the sidewalk. I never learned the reason. I doubt it even exists. There's only this humiliating compulsive (by whom?) approval as we nod 'yes,' as though greeting someone with incredible servility, though nobody's passing, nobody's there.
I think another person, with a totally colourless voice related to me one evening the details of my life; I was sleepy and wishing deep inside that he'd finally stop; that I could close my eyes, and sleep. And as he spoke, in order to do something, to fight off sleep, I counted the tassels on my shawl, one by one, to the tune of a silly children's song of Blindman's Buff, until the meaning got lost in the repetition. But the sound remains – noises, thuds, scrapings – the drone of silence, a discordant weeping, someone scratches the wall with his fingernails, a scissor falls onto the floor boards, someone coughs – his hand over his mouth, so as not to awaken the other sleeping with him – maybe his death – stops; and once again that spiralling drone from an empty, shut-up well.
At night I hear the servants moving my big pieces of furniture; they take them down the stairs – a mirror, held like a stretcher, reveals the worn-out plaster designs on the ceiling; a windowpane knocks against the railings – it doesn't break; the old overcoat on the coat-rack raises its empty arms for a moment, slips them back into the pockets; the little wheels of the sofa's legs creak on the floor. I can feel right here on my elbow the scratching on the wall made by the corners of the wardrobe or the big carved table. What are they going to do with them? 'Goodbye,' I say almost mechanically, as though bidding farewell to a visitor who's always a stranger. There's only that vague droning which lingers in the hallway as though from the horn of downfallen hunting lords in the last drops of rain, in a burnt-out-forest. Honestly, so many useless things collected with so much greed blocked the space – we couldn't move; our knees knocked against wooden, stony, metallic knees. Oh, we've really got to grow old, very old, to become just, to reach that mild impartiality, that sweet lack of interest in comparisons, judgements, when it's no longer our lot to take part in anything except this quietness.
Oh yes, how many silly battles, heroic deeds, ambitions, arrogance, sacrifices and defeats, defeats, and still more battles for things that others determined when we weren't there. Innocent people poking hairpins into their eyes, banging their heads on the high wall, knowing full well that it wouldn't fall or even crack, just to see at least from a little crevice a slight sky-blue unshadowed by time and their own shadows. Meanwhile – who knows – perhaps there, where someone is resisting, hopelessly, perhaps there human history begins, so to speak, and man's beauty among rusty bits of iron and the bones of bulls and horses, among ancient tripods where some laurel still burns and the smoke rises curling in the sunset like a golden fleece. Stay awhile longer. Evening's falling. The gold fleece we spoke of – Oh, thought comes slowly to us women – it relaxes somehow. On the other hand men never stop to think – maybe they're afraid; maybe they don't want to look their fear straight in the eye, to see their fatigue, to relax – timid, conceited, busybodies, they surge into darkness. Their clothes always smell of smoke from a conflagration they've passed by or through unwittingly. Quickly they undress; fling their clothes onto the floor; fall into bed. But even their bodies reek of smoke – it numbs them. I used to find, when they were finally asleep, some fine burnt leaves among the hairs on their chests or some ash-grey down from slain birds. Then I'd gather them up and keep them in a small box – the only signs of a secret communion – I never showed these to them – they wouldn't have recognized them.
Sometimes, oh yes, they were beautiful – naked as they were, surrendered to sleep, thoroughly unresisting, loosened up, their big strong bodies, damp and softened, like roaring rivers surging down from high mountains into a quiet plain, or like abandoned children. At such times I really loved them, as though I'd given birth to them. I noticed their long eyelashes and I wanted to draw them back into me, to protect them, or in this way to couple with their whole bodies. They were sleeping. And sleep demands respect from you, because it's so rare. That's all over too. All forgotten.
Not that I don't remember anymore – I do; it's just that the memories are no longer emotional – they can't move us – they're impersonal, placid, clear right into their most bloody corners. Only one of them still retains some air around it, and breathes. That late afternoon, when I was surrounded by the endless shrieks of the wounded, the mumbled curses of the old men and their wonder of me, amid the smell of overall death, which, from time to time glittered on a shield or the tip of a spear or the metope of a neglected temple or the wheel of a chariot – I went up alone onto the high walls and strolled around. Alone, utterly alone, between the Trojans and Achaeans, feeling the wind pressing my fine veils against me, brushing my nipples, embracing my whole body both clothed and naked, with only a single wide silver belt holding my breasts up high – there I was, beautiful, untouched, experienced while my two rivals in love were duelling and the fate of the long war was being determined – I didn't even see the strap of Paris' helmet severed – instead I saw a brightness from its brass, a circular brightness, as his opponent swung it in rage around his head – an illumined zero. It wasn't really worth looking at – the will of the gods had shaped things from the start; and Paris, divested of his dusty sandals, would soon be in bed, cleansed by the hands of the goddess, waiting for me, smirking, pretentiously hiding a false scar on his side with a pink bandage. I didn't watch anymore; hardly even listened to their war-cries – I, high up on the walls, over the heads of mortals, airy, carnate, belonging to no one, needing no one as though I were (I, independent) absolute Love – free from the fear of death and time, with a white flower in my hair, with a flower between my breasts, and another in between my lips hiding for me the smile of freedom. They could have shot their arrows at me from either side. I was an easy target walking slowly on the walls, completely etched against the golden crimson of the evening sky. I kept my eyes closed to make any hostile gesture easy for them – knowing deeply that none of them would dare. Their hands trembled with awe at my beauty and immortality – (maybe I can elaborate on that: I didn't fear death because I felt it was so far from me). Then I tossed down the two flowers from my hair and breasts – keeping the third one in my mouth – I tossed them down from both sides of the wall with an absolutely impartial gesture. Then the men, both within and without, threw themselves upon each other, enemies and friends, to snatch the flowers, to offer them to me – my own flowers. I didn't see anything else after that – only bent backs, as if all of them were kneeling on the ground, where the sun was drying the blood – maybe they had even crushed the flowers. I didn't see. I'd raised my arms and risen on the tips of my toes, and ascended letting the third flower also drop from my lips.
All this remains with me still – a sort of consolation, a remote justification, and perhaps this will remain, I hope, somewhere in the world – a momentary freedom, illusory too of course – a game of our luck and our ignorance. In precisely that position (as I recall), the sculptors worked on my last statues; they're still out there in the garden; you must have seen them when you came in. Sometimes I also (when the servants are in good spirits and hold me by my arms to take me to that chair in front of the window), I also can see them. They glow in the sunlight. A white heat wafts from the marble right up here. I won't dwell on it any longer. It tires me out too after awhile. I'd rather watch a part of the street where two or three kids play with a rag ball, or some girl lowers a basket on a rope from the balcony across the way. Sometimes the servants forget I'm there. They don't come to put me back in bed. I stay all night gazing at an old bicycle, propped up in front of the lit window of a new candy store, until the lights go out, or I fall asleep on the windowsill. Every now and then I think that a star wakes me, falling through space like the saliva from the toothless, slack mouth of an old man. Now it's been ages since they've taken me to the window. I stay here in bed sitting up or lying down – I can handle that. To pass the time I grasp my face – an unfamiliar face – touch it, feel it, count the hairs, the wrinkles, the warts – who's inside this face? Something acrid rises in my throat – nausea and fear, a silly fear, my God, that even the nausea might be lost. Stay for awhile – a little light's coming through the window – they must have lit the street lamps.
Wouldn't you like me to ring for something for you? – some preserved cherries or candied bitter orange – maybe something's left in the big jars, turned to congealed sugar by now – if, of course the greedy servants have left anything. The last few years I've been busy making sweets – what else is there to do? After Troy – life in Sparta was very dull – really provincial; shut up all day at home, among the crowded spoils of so many wars; and memories, faded and annoying, sneaking up behind you in the mirror as you combed your hair, or in the kitchen emerging from the greasy vapours of the pot; and you hear in the water's boiling a few dactylic hexametres from the Third Rhapsody as a cock crows discordantly, close by, from a neighbour's coop.
You surely know how humdrum our life is. Even the newspapers have the same shape, size, headlines – I no longer read them. Over and over flags on balconies, national celebrations, parades of toy soldiers – only the cavalry maintained something improvised, something personal – maybe because of the horses. The dust rose like a cloud; we closed the window – afterward you'd have to go about dusting, piece by piece, vases, little boxes, picture frames, small porcelain statues, mirrors, buffets. I stopped going to the celebrations. My husband used to come back sweating, fling himself on his food, licking his chops, re-chewing old, boring glories and resentments gone up in smoke. I stared at his waistcoat buttons which were about to pop – he'd become quite fat. Under his chin a large black stain flickered.
Then I'd prop my chin up, distractedly, continuing my meal, feeling my lower jaw move in my hand as though it were detached from my head, and I was holding it naked in my palm. Maybe because of this I got fat too. I don't know. Everybody seemed scared – I saw them sometimes from the windows – walking on a slant, sort of limping, as though they were concealing something under their arms. Afternoons the bells range dismally. The beggars knocked on the doors. In the distance as night fell, the white-washed façade of the Maternity Hospital seemed whiter, farther away and unknowable. We lit the lamps quickly. I'd alter an old dress. Then the sewing machine broke down; they took it into the basement with those old romantic oil paintings full of banal mythical scenes – Aphrodites rising from the sea, Eagles and Ganymedes.
One by one our old acquaintances left. The mail diminished. Only a brief postcard for special occasions, birthdays – a stereotyped scene of Mount Taygetos with ridged peaks, very blue, a part of the Eurotas river with white pebbles and rhododendrons, or the ruins of Mistras with wild fig trees. But more often, telegrams of condolences. No answers came. Maybe the recipient had died in the meantime – we don't get news anymore.
My husband travelled no more. Didn't open a book. In his later years he grew very nervous. He smoked incessantly. Strolled around at nights in the huge living room, with those tattered brown slippers and his long nightgown. At noon, at the table, he'd bring up memories of Clytemnestra's infidelity and how right Orestes' actions were as though he were threatening someone. Who cared? I didn't even listen. Yet when he died, I missed him much – I missed most of all his silly threats, as though they'd frozen me into an immobile position in time, as though they'd prevented me from becoming old. Then I used to dream of Odysseus, he too with the same agelessness, with his smart triangular cap, delaying his return, that crafty guy – with the pretence of imaginary dangers, whereas he'd throw himself (supposedly shipwrecked) at times in the arms of a Circe, at times in the arms of a Nausicaa, to have the barnacles taken off his chest, to be bathed with small bars of rose soap, to have the scar on his knee kissed, to be anointed with oil.
I think he also reached Ithaca – dull, fat Penelope must have muffled him up in those things she weaves. I never got a message from him again – the servants might have torn them up – what does it matter anymore? The Symblygades shifted to another more inner place – you can feel them immobile, softened – worse than ever – they don't crush, they drown you in a thick, black fluid – nobody escapes them. You may go now. Night's fallen. I'm sleepy. Oh, to close my eyes, to sleep, to see nothing outside or inside, to forget the fear of sleeping and awakening. I can't. I jump up – I'm afraid I'll never wake again. I stay up, listening to the snoring of the servants from the living room, the spiders on the walls, the cockroaches in the kitchen, the dead snoring with deep inhalations, as though sound asleep, calmed down. Now I'm even losing my dead. I've lost them. They're gone.
Sometimes, after midnight, the rhythmic hoofbeats of the horses of a late carriage can be heard, as though they are returning from a dismal show of some broken-down theatre in the neighbourhood with its plaster fallen from the ceiling, its peeling walls, its enormous faded red curtain drawn, shrunken from too many washings, leaving a space below to reveal the bare feet of the great stage manager or the electrician maybe rolling up a paper forest so the lights can be shut off.
That crack is still alight, while in the auditorium the applause and the chandeliers are long since vanished. The air is heavy with the breath of silence, the hum of silence beneath the empty seats together with the shells from sunflower seeds and twisted-up tickets, a few buttons, a lace handkerchief, and a piece of red string. ... And that scene, on the walls of Troy – did I really undergo an ascension, letting fall from my lips – ? Sometimes even now, as I lie here in bed, I try to raise my arms, to stand on tiptoe – to stand on air – the third flower –
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Trojan Women"
by .
Copyright © 1981 Barry Callaghan.
Excerpted by permission of Exile Editions Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
HELEN, by Yannis Ritsos,
THE TROJAN WOMEN, a play by Euripides,
ORESTES, by Yannis Ritsos,
Related Reading,
Questions for Discussion and Essays,
Websites of Interest,
What People are Saying About This
“It’s significant that MacEwen would choose to translate The Trojan Women and Helen texts, for after all, they are filled with the plaint of women, their powerlessness, their victimization, and a sense of isolation . . . The vocabulary of these translations is so much MacEwen’s own that they seem almost to have been written by her. These translations are deeply felt.” —Margaret Atwood, author, The Penelopiad