An Iliad (17 page)
Authors: Alessandro Baricco
Cassandra cried out. But no one would listen to her. And her father, Priam, reproached her violently. “Prophetess of doom, what evil divinity has possessed you this time? Does our joy distress you? Can’t you let us celebrate in peace this long-awaited day of freedom? The war is over, Cassandra. And this horse isn’t doom but a worthy gift for Athena, the patron goddess of our city. Go, return to the palace, we no longer need you. From today onward, there is to be no more fear in the shadow of the walls of Troy, but only joy, and celebration, and liberty.” So Cassandra was dragged into the darkness of the palace by force. In her eyes Troy was already burning in the leaping flames of ruin.
They brought the horse to the temple of Athena, placing it on a high pedestal. All around, the people indulged in the most unrestrained joy, abandoning themselves to their folly and forgetting all caution. A few sentries stood at the gates, survivors of a war that was thought to be over. Finally, in the rosy light of sunset, Helen of Argos came out of the palace, brilliantly arrayed. Under the admiring eyes of the Trojans she crossed the city and arrived at the feet of the giant horse. Then she did a strange thing. She circled around it three times, imitating the
voices of the wives of the Achaean heroes hidden inside, calling them, and begging them to come to her arms. Enclosed in the blind darkness of the belly of the horse, the five Achaeans felt their hearts breaking. It really was the voices of their wives, however incredible; it was their voices, and the voices were calling them. It was a cruel sweetness, and they all felt the tears rise in their eyes, and anguish swelled their hearts. Suddenly Anticlus, who was the weakest and the most inexperienced, opened his mouth to cry out. Odysseus jumped on him and pressed his hands over his mouth, both hands, forcefully. Anticlus began to wriggle, trying desperately to free himself. But implacable Odysseus pressed his hands over his mouth and didn’t stop until Anticlus gave a shudder and then another, and a last, violent jolt, and then died, suffocated.
At the feet of the horse, Helen of Argos threw a last glance at the mute belly of the creature. Then she turned and went back to the palace.
The whole city, then, sank into slumber. Flutes and pipes slid from hands, and the last barking of the dogs punctuated the silence that is the companion of peace.
In the still night, a torch shone, to give the sign to the Achaean fleet. A traitor let it shine high in the darkness. But some say that it was Helen of Argos herself who betrayed Troy. And while the Achaean ships returned to the beach, and in silence the army flooded the plain, from the belly of the horse came Odysseus, Menelaus, Diomedes, and Neoptole-mus. Like lions they set on the sentries at the gates, shedding the first blood of that terrible night. The first shouts rose into the sky over Troy. Mothers woke without understanding, hugging their children and grieving softly, like swallows. Men turned in their sleep with presentiments of doom, dreaming of their own death. When the Achaean army came through the
gates, the massacre began. Widow of her warriors, the city began to vomit corpses. Men died without time to seize their weapons, women died without even trying to escape. The children died in their arms and, in their wombs, the unborn. Old men died without dignity as, lying on the ground, they raised their arms begging to be spared. Dogs and birds, intoxicated, went wild fighting for the blood and flesh of the dead.
In the midst of the massacre Odysseus and Menelaus rushed about, looking for the rooms of Helen and Deiphobus: they wanted to take back what they had so long been fighting for. They surprised Deiphobus as he tried to escape. Menelaus thrust the sword into his stomach. His guts poured out on the ground and Deiphobus fell, oblivious of war and chariots forever. They found Helen in her rooms. She followed her old husband, trembling. In her heart she felt relief for the end of her misfortune, and shame for what it had been.
Now I should sing of that night. I should sing of Priam, killed at the foot of the altar of Zeus, and little Astyanax, hurled by Odysseus down from the walls, and the lament of Andromache, and the shame of Hecuba, dragged off like a slave, and the terror of Cassandra, raped by Oilean Ajax on the altar of Athena. I should sing of a race that was butchered, and a beautiful city that became a flaming pyre and the silent tomb of its sons. I should sing of that night, but I am only a bard. Let the Muses do it, if they can. A night of such sorrow I will not sing.
Thus I spoke. Then I realized that that man, the man without a name, was weeping. He wept like a woman, like a wife bent over the man she loves who has been murdered by his enemies. He wept like a girl captured by a soldier, a slave forever. Alci-nous, the king, realized it, sitting next to him, and nodded to
me to stop singing. Then he leaned toward the stranger and said, “Why do you weep, friend, hearing the story of Ilium? It was the gods who willed that night of blood, and those men died so that afterward they would be sung of forever. Why does their story make you suffer? Maybe on that night your father, your brother died, or you lost a friend in that war? Do not be obstinate in your silence, and tell me who you are and where you are from, and who is your father. No one comes into the world without a name, however rich or poor. Tell me your name, stranger.”
The man lowered his gaze. Then he said softly, “I am Odysseus. I come from Ithaca and there, one day, I will return.”
This is not just an ordinary time in which to read the
Iliad.
Or, rather, to rewrite it, as I have done. This is a time of war. And although “war” seems to me the wrong word to describe what is happening in the world (a term of convenience, I would call it), certainly it is a time when a kind of prideful barbarism that for millennia was linked to the experience of war has again become a daily experience. Battles, assassinations, bombings, torture, decapitations, betrayals. Heroism, weapons, strategic plans, volunteers, ultimatums, proclamations. From some depths that we thought were sealed, the whole atrocious and shining armamentarium that from time immemorial has been the escort of mankind at war has returned to the surface. In such a context—extremely delicate and shocking—even the details take on a particular significance. To read the
Iliad
in public is a detail, but it is not an ordinary detail. To be clear, I would like to say that the
Iliad
is a story of war, without caution and without half measures, and that it was composed in
order to sing of mankind at war, and to do it in a way so memorable that it would endure into eternity, as far as the last child of a child, continuing to sing of the solemn beauty, and the immutable emotion, that war once was and always will be. In school, maybe, they tell it differently. But the point is this. The
Iliad
is a monument to war.
So the question naturally arises: what meaning does it have at a time like this to dedicate so much space and attention and time to a monument to war? How in the world, when there are so many stories, does one find oneself drawn to that one, as if it were a light that dictated a flight into the darkness of these days?
I think a true answer could be given only if one were capable of understanding completely our relationship to
all
stories of war, and not this one in particular: understanding our instinct to never stop telling those stories. But it’s a complex matter, which certainly can’t be resolved here, and by me. What I can do is stay with the
Iliad and
note two things that, in a year of working closely with the text, occurred to me: two things that summarize what in that story appeared to me with the force and clarity that only true lessons have.
The first. One of the surprising things in the
Iliad
is the power, I would even say compassion, with which the motivations of the conquered are conveyed. It’s a story written by the conquerors, and yet our memory preserves also, if not above all, the human figures of the Trojans: Priam, Hector, Andromache, even minor characters like Pandarus and Sarpedon. I found, working on the text, this supernatural capacity to be the voice of all humanity and not only of themselves, and discovered how the Greeks have handed down, in the
Iliad,
between the lines of a monument to war, the memory of a stubborn love for peace. At first sight, blinded by the brightness of
armor and heroes, you don’t realize it. But in the shadow of reflection an
Iliad
that you don’t expect emerges. I mean the feminine side of the
Iliad.
It’s often the women who express, without mediation, the desire for peace. Relegated to the margins of combat, they embody the persistent and almost clandestine hypothesis of an alternative civilization, free from the duty of war. They are convinced that one could live in a different way, and they say so. They say it most clearly in Book 6, a small masterpiece of sentimental geometry. In a suspended moment, empty, stolen from battle, Hector enters the city and meets three women, and it’s like a journey to the other side of the world. On close examination, all three utter the same plea—for peace—but each with her own emotional tonality. His mother asks him to pray. Helen invites him to sit beside her and rest (and also something more, perhaps). Andromache, finally, asks him to be father and husband ahead of hero and fighter. Especially in this last dialogue, the synthesis is of an almost didactic clarity: two possible worlds stand facing each other, and each has its arguments. Tougher, blinder, those of Hector; modern, much more human, those of Andromache. Is it not remarkable that a male and warlike civilization like that of the Greeks chose to hand down, into eternity, the voice of women and their desire for peace?
One learns about the feminine side of the
Iliad
from that voice, but, once you’ve learned about it, you find it everywhere, shadowy, almost imperceptible, but incredibly tenacious. I see it very strongly in the innumerable places in the
Iliad
in which the heroes, instead of fighting, talk. There are assemblies that never end, interminable debates, and you stop hating them only when you begin to understand what in fact they are: a way of putting off the battle as long as possible. They are Scheherazade, who saves herself by telling stories.
The word is the weapon with which men freeze the war. Even when they are discussing how to carry on the war, they’re not carrying it on, and this is always a way of saving themselves. They are all condemned to death, but they make the final cigarette last an eternity, and they smoke it with the words. Then, when they do go into battle, they are transformed into blind heroes, forgetful of escape, fanatically devoted to duty. But first: first is a long time, feminine, a time of knowing delays and childish backward looks.
This sort of reluctance of the hero is, rightly, concentrated to the highest and most dazzling degree in Achilles. It is he who takes the longest time, in the
Iliad,
to go into battle. It is he who, like a woman, is present at the war from a distance, playing a lyre and staying beside those he loves. The very one who is the most ferocious and fanatical, a literally superhuman incarnation of war. The geometry of the
Iliad
is, in this, of a stunning precision. Where the triumph of warrior culture is strongest, the more tenacious and persistent is the feminine inclination to peace. Finally, what can’t be confessed by the heroes erupts in Achilles, in the unmediated clarity of explicit and definitive speech. What he says to the delegation sent by Agamemnon, in Book 9, is perhaps the most violent and incontrovertible cry for peace that our fathers have handed down to us:
Nothing, for me, is worth life: not the treasures that the prosperous city of Ilium possessed before, in time of peace, before the sons of the Danaans arrived; not the riches that, beyond the stone threshold, the temple of Apollo, lord of arrows, in rocky Pythos, contains; oxen and fat sheep can be stolen, tripods and tawny-maned horses can be bought; but the life of a man does not come back, one cannot steal or buy it, once it has passed the barrier of the teeth.
They are words for Andromache, but in the
Iliad
Achilles utters them, the high priest of the religion of war, and so they resound with an unmatched authority. In that voice—which, buried under a monument to war, says farewell to war, choosing life—the
Iliad
lets us glimpse a civilization that the Greeks could not achieve and yet had an intuition of, and knew, and even preserved in a secret and protected corner of their feelings. Bringing to fulfillment that intuition is perhaps what the
Iliad
offers as our inheritance, and task, and duty.
How to undertake such a task? What must we do to induce the world to follow its own inclination for peace? About this, too, it seems to me, the
Iliad
has something to teach us. And it does so in its most obvious and shocking aspect: its warrior and masculine aspect. It’s indisputable that the story presents war as an almost natural outlet of civil life. But it doesn’t confine itself to that. It does something much more important and, if you like, intolerable: it sings the
beauty
of war, and does so with memorable power and passion. There is almost no hero whose splendor, moral and physical, at the moment of combat we do not recall. There is almost no death that is not an altar, richly decorated and adorned with poetry. The fascination with arms and armor is invariable, and admiration for the aesthetic beauty of the movement of armies is constant. The animals in war are beautiful, and nature is solemn when it is called on to frame the slaughter. Even the blows and wounds are celebrated as lofty creations of a paradoxically cruel but accomplished artisan. One would say that everything, from the men to the earth, finds in the experience of war its highest realization, both aesthetic and moral: like the glorious peak of a parabola that only in the atrocity of a mortal clash finds its fulfillment. In this homage to the beauty of war the
Iliad
forces
us to recall something disturbing but inexorably true: for millennia war has been for men the circumstance in which the intensity—the beauty—of life is released in all its power and truth. It was almost the only possibility for changing one’s destiny, for discovering the truth of oneself, for gaining a high ethical knowledge. In contrast to the anemic emotions of life and the mediocre moral stature of the everyday, war sets the world in motion and thrusts individuals outside their accustomed confines into a place of the soul that must seem to them, at last, the harbor of every seeking and every desire. I am not speaking of distant, primitive times: just a few years ago, refined intellectuals like Wittgenstein and Gadda obstinately sought the front line, the front, in an inhuman war, with the conviction that only there would they find themselves. They were not weak individuals, or without means and culture. And yet, as their diaries testify, they lived in the conviction that that peak experience—the atrocious practice of mortal combat—could offer them what daily life was unable to express. This conviction reflects the profile of a civilization that never died and in which war remained the burning fulcrum of human experience, the engine of any becoming. Even today, in a time when for the majority of human beings the hypothesis of going into battle is little more than an absurdity, we continue to feed, with wars fought by proxy with the bodies of professional soldiers, the old brazier of the warrior spirit, betraying our serious incapacity to find a meaning in life that can forgo that moment of truth. The ill-concealed masculine pride that, in the West as in the Islamic world, has accompanied the latest warrior exhibitions lets us recognize an instinct that the shock of the wars of the twentieth century has evidently not put to sleep. The
Iliad
describes this system of thought and this mode of feeling, concentrating it under a
synthetic and perfect sign: beauty. The beauty of war—of each of its details—expresses its centrality in human experience, conveys the idea that there is nothing else, in human experience, that enables one to truly exist.
What the
Iliad
perhaps suggests is that pacifism, today, must not forget or deny that beauty, as if it had never existed. To say and teach that war is hell and that’s all is a damaging lie. Although it sounds terrible, we must remember that war is hell—
but beautiful.
Men have always thrown themselves into it, drawn like moths to the fatal light of the flame. There is no fear, or horror of themselves, that has succeeded in keeping them from the flame, because in it they find the only possible recompense for the shadows of life. For this reason, today, the task of a true pacifism should be not to demonize war excessively so much as to understand that only when we are capable of another kind of beauty will we be able to do without what war has always offered us. To construct another kind of beauty is perhaps the only route to true peace. To show ourselves capable of illuminating the shadows of existence without recourse to the flame of war. To give a powerful meaning to things without having to place them in the blinding light of death. To be able to change one’s own destiny without having to take possession of another’s; to mobilize money and wealth without having recourse to violence; to find an ethical dimension, the highest, without having to search for it at the margins of death; to find oneself in the intensity of places and moments that are not a trench; to know emotion, even the most impassioned, without having to resort to the drug of war or the methadone of small daily acts of violence. Another kind of beauty, if you know what I mean.
Today peace is little more than a political convenience. It’s certainly not a truly widespread system of thought and way of
feeling. War is considered an evil to avoid, of course, but it is far from being considered an absolute evil. At the first occasion, clothed in beautiful ideas, going into battle quickly becomes a real option again. At times it is even chosen with a certain pride. The moths continue to destruct in the light of the flame. A real, prophetic, and courageous ambition for peace I see only in the patient and secret work of millions of artists who every day work to create
another kind of beauty,
and the glow of bright lights that do not kill. It’s a utopian undertaking, which assumes an extreme trust in man. But I wonder if we have ever gone so far on such a path as we have today. And for that reason I think that no one, now, will any longer be able to stop that movement, or change its direction. We will succeed, sooner or later, in taking Achilles away from that fatal war. And it will not be fear or horror that carries him home. It will be a different sort of beauty, more dazzling than his, and infinitely more gentle.