Memoirs of a Bitch (16 page)

“You were calling out names,” he said in a neutral tone.

I noticed, as if for the first time, how deep his voice was, a rich warm bass.

“A woman, Hermione. Then other names. Greeks.”

“Hermione is my daughter.” My voice was trying to be neutral, but failed, as useless as a discarded scrap of thread at the bottom of an empty chest.

“Did you love the Greeks?” His rough timbre was insistent though he was trying hard, like me, to control his voice.

“I used to think I did. Now I'm not sure anymore.”

“Because of Paris.” It was not a question. His breathing was slower, the urgency gone, and I would have liked to describe the shadow behind his words as sadness, but Hector was in any case a melancholy man, and I lacked Cassandra's gift of clairvoyance. I turned my face to the wall, as if by so doing I could negate his presence. He waited a long moment, then took my chin in his fingers and forced me to turn back toward him. I remembered the gentle force of Aeneas holding Cassandra's wrists.

“Look at me.”

Look at me.
I did so. He had neither the burning black eyes of Diomedes, the unbearable eyes of Achilles, nor the green eyes of my cremated love, those eyes once so limpid in the star-filled Spartan night. No, Hector's eyes were like gorges, wells dug deep in the black surface of the earth, or shady valleys in woods otherwise flooded with sunlight. They seemed to see right into me, reading, understanding and forgiving. I slapped away his hand, because his eyes seemed to be invading me with a condescending contempt.

“Don't look at me like that.”

He said nothing, but went on looking.

“You seem to be judging me, as though you understand me; I don't need your forgiveness.”

“Nor I yours, Helen; but I'm asking you to forgive me all the same.”

I turned. “What for?”

He straightened up, a very tall man kneeling on the floor, and turned away. “I was so happy when I saw Paris go back to being his old self, taking a new woman every night. I was so happy—yes, Helen, I really was—when you stopped smothering yourself in gold and purple and started climbing the path to Cassandra every day. I never thought of the grief that must have crushed you, only of the solitude you had won that seemed like freedom to me.” He bent his head, like the shadowy dark horse that he was, and continued in his dark voice.

“Freedom for you to come to me. And for me to find you in that bed under that coverlet, by your own free choice. You were right, Helen; I'm a man just like all the others, and there's nothing different about my desire.”

He was looking at me over his right shoulder. “Listen. All I want to say is that what keeps me here talking to you as if I was a child is not your body or your name but the sparkle in your eyes the first time I saw you. I never felt contempt for you, only envy. I never had that sparkle and never could have it. But I wanted it.” He stopped, leaving the last two words suspended in the air like a broken feather.

“Children don't speak like that.” The words came so slowly, so smoothly, so naturally to me, that I hardly realized I had said them.

“Nor do men.” There was a funereal cadence in his
voice, as if he knew as much as anyone and more than most about the death waiting for him around the corner of the road. I smiled, not from scorn or for fun, but from a strange hidden joy.

“Heroes then.”

He turned, and I remembered the first time I had seen his face with its strong features and gloomy expression; it was as if we were back in the thick milky fog of my first day in Troy. In that sea of nothingness where time could curl around like a serpent and return to its beginning.

“Paris doesn't matter to me,” I said in a low voice, and it was true, in that golden light that brought past and future together.

“And the Greeks?”

I didn't answer, I just moved closer to the wall, leaving half the narrow bed for him. He surprised me with a smile; I realized Cassandra was right, because there was even something sad in his smile.

“We can never fit together here, Helen. And I'm in no hurry.”

“Nor am I. All I want is to sleep. With you.”

He paused a moment in his smile, then came and sat beside me. The only way for us both to lie on that camp bed was for him to take me in his arms, making the hollow of his collarbone my pillow and his chest my couch. I closed my eyes in the golden light, and slept.

So began the time of my love for Hector, the season of my last love. The siege beyond the walls was merely a background noise, because I had my light and my sun within the walls, my redemption for a life of unhappiness punctuated by rare moments of joy that had always cost too high a price.

Five years passed like this, years of serenity when nothing happened, while Troy headed for ruin with no one answering her call. The Greek huts on the shore grew into stone houses, and the ships hauled up on the sand became overgrown with moss and began to rot. Priam's treasure dwindled and the parties became few and far between. Paris, putting on weight from enforced leisure, hardly ever crossed my path. The whole city knew that the heir to the throne was spending his afternoons
after maneuvers in the rooms of the Greek woman; and the whole city saw us together climbing the path to the temple of Apollo and its obliging shade.

Bitch, bitch
, Paris's lovers would whisper as they slipped silently down the corridors, but their words meant nothing to me. What they did not know was that Hector held the wool for me while I was weaving, and the distaff while I was spinning, and that during the long Trojan evenings he would walk with me in the red shadows cast by the sun in the garden—deserted now that the princesses were sleeping longer hours to preserve their beauty for better times, with somewhere else Queen Hecuba sitting studying her hands in silence.

Our world was collapsing around us, and Hector knew it; he knew it from the streets of Troy overgrown with grass because their inhabitants now hardly ever left their houses, exhausted by an epidemic that had decimated them in the third year; and he knew it from the empty Hellespont beyond the besieging Greeks on the beach. He knew it because our allies had not come to the rescue of Troy, and were now falling one after another to the attacks of determined men sent against them by Agamemnon. Asia Minor was the only compensation the obstinate king could offer his tired soldiers. Refugees crowded under the walls discussing Achilles and Diomedes and the anger of Ares.

These names touched a part of me that was vigilant and on guard, and that knew the reason for the sad warning in Cassandra's eyes, and the uncontrollable trembling that often seized her. Cassandra knew but did not speak, and pretended like the rest of us that our make-believe peace, our tiny war-free fragment of life, would last forever. Hector's hand holding my own was no illusion, any more than the anxious shadow of Aeneas at the edge of my field of vision, nor the silent devotion that drove me every day to climb up to the temple of Apollo where Cassandra would be officiating. People see what they want to see, and no one ever noticed the second-in-command of the Trojan army sitting for hours on the wall in the temple courtyard watching Cassandra teaching the secret doctrine of the future to her initiates, while the seasons slowly unfolded over our heads and the world turned calmly and silently on its way, taking with it the obstinate silent love of Aeneas, the rage he took out on his wooden targets, the furious desire in his blood for Cassandra, and the ill-kept secret in his eyes. But men believe what they see, and in him they saw the blood of their own shattered dreams.

Shut away by that siege whose outcome he could guess, on those garden lawns we still had to ourselves, Hector was happy with me; happy with a twilight happiness in which to lay his head in my lap was the most he ever
asked for. A disembodied love, even though my blood raced at the slightest touch of his lips on my neck; it was an attempt to love differently from the only way my flesh had ever known. There was space for such a love in Hector's infinitely deep eyes, and space in my heart too, among the ruined buildings of Troy on the shores of a Hellespont empty of ships. I knew my new happiness could not last forever, but for five long years I was able to enjoy the blinding privilege of that golden light.

With his fingers interlaced with mine, Hector was walking slowly in the lazy blood-red shadows of evening, during the late summer of our seventh year of war. From beyond the thick garden walls we could hear the resonant voice of Aeneas directing the changing of the guard, but by the lake where the swans were now thinner, one could pretend not to hear. The gloomy call of the war waiting for seven years beyond the wall tolled like a bell to signal each night and start each new day of that still, silent life. When I squeezed his hand harder, Hector looked away.

“I have to talk to you,” he said.

“I know.”

He looked into my eyes. “Cassandra …?”

“No, Callira told me.”

He shook his head. “That Glaucus should control his tongue.”

“It doesn't matter.”

Without releasing my hand, he sat down on the grass. “I can't refuse, the Hittites are our last hope. We can't turn down their offer of marriage.”

“I know.”

He looked up at me. I forced a smile. I knew my face showed no emotion.

“So you don't mind?”

“I mind more than I can say. But I know your duty.”

“I shall come to you just the same. I won't leave you or forget you.”

The flame in his eyes was simultaneously passionate and gentle. I touched his cheek and a few loose locks of his long dark hair.

“You would never betray your wife.”

He squeezed my hand and kissed it fiercely. “Nor can I betray myself. Or you.”

There was nothing more to be said, so I kept silent and pressed my head against his shoulder. “Shh. Don't think about it, not now. It'll be months before they get here from Hattusa.”

“Not long enough.”

Now even the birds were silent. Only a light wind murmured among the leaves, which would very soon be
turning yellow with the slow death that winter brings. The darkening shadows cast by the setting sun swept across the lawn like a sound.

“What does Aeneas say?”

“Listen.”

I opened my ears to the war over the wall and the regular step of the guard. A shouted command, and they broke ranks. Then the voice of Aeneas was interrupted and silenced by an angry wave of sharp pain. My arms tightened around Hector.

Suddenly he was holding me like a vice and pressing me to his chest with the urgency of desperation. Neither of us spoke again before Callira came to my door at sunset to call me, motionless in the twilight with a shawl around her shoulders and her eyes far away, as if she could already hear the slow, relentless approach of the carriage from the shadowy mountains of Anatolia.

The door in the wall opened silently on well-oiled hinges used by seven years of furtive messengers. I watched Hector close the door after himself and it disappeared, hidden among rust-colored stones and the branches of the wild fig that grew over it. Between us and Mount Ida were only the Scamander River and a secure ford, within range of our own archers. No Greek would ever push so far, and the entire population of Troy could
have slipped through this secret door into the shady oblivion of the forest without anyone realizing it. But pride was the ultimate mortar holding the city together, and I let Hector take my hand and guide me toward the dry sandbanks through water that was only now beginning to rise. Soon all the fords would be closed for the winter. The soft whisper of water mingled with the soughing of the trees as we disappeared into their shadow. Finally the sun fell below the horizon, dripping liquid gold on the rocks and firing arrows of light through the branches.

The almost invisible path continued under our feet. Hector never looked back, but my hand was safe in his, and as I walked I could hear the leaves rustling against the hem of my cloak. The green light above us turned the cupola of sky into a roof. Animals were going about their own private concerns in the undergrowth as I followed Hector. Then we came to a clearing and he suddenly stopped. Still holding his hand, I came closer to him and followed his gaze. He was looking at a ruined temple; its roof had fallen in and tentacles of ivy had crept over its decaying walls. Long grass was growing on its crumbling steps and the twisting boughs of a willow were bent over its gutted interior. An abandoned place. I looked questioningly at Hector but he did not react. Then after a long silence he said, “Do you see the house?”

Four stone walls, and on the threshold the skeleton of a dead tree. “What is this place?”

“Somewhere I used to come, long ago.” He released my hand and slowly climbed the steps to the ruin, stopping at the entrance with his eyes closed as if trying to recapture an elusive memory. Then suddenly he looked up and walked in. I followed. The interior was in an even worse state; beams from the collapsed roof were lying on the floor as the last feeble rays of twilight fell on a simple altar. There were no paintings or statues.

“Who was worshipped here?”

He said nothing. When I turned, he was sitting on the bottom step of the altar studying his hands as if he had no further use for them.

“Hector, what is this place?”

“I was just a boy. Not yet twenty years old, but past fifteen. Accustomed to the forest and its animals. I used to walk through it every day, often with Aeneas. Sometimes we'd spend many days hunting. We'd catch wild horses on the plain beyond the mountain.” He paused, as if searching for the shadow of what he had once been.

“I would come to this place alone. It belonged to a priestess. A foreigner, I think from Crete. She worshipped Mother Earth in this temple which has forgotten her. She spoke our language with a soft accent. She was so
beautiful.” He spoke calmly, quietly. “I used to come here often to see her, then one day the house was empty. She must have had to go back to her own land, after only a short time here. They would send one priestess at a time as a missionary. I don't know which myth their cult was based on.” Hector closed his eyes again and a profound silence fell; the light was now turning blue. “She never came back. No one else took her place. The disaster in Crete must have claimed her too.”