Memoirs of a Bitch (17 page)

He had finished his story. I waited in silence, a pale echo of his words lingering on the clear air. His first, strange, love. When he spoke again, it was in a cracked voice. “I never thought one day I myself would have to go too.”

He turned to me, his eyes shining with sadness.

“You're not going away.”

“But I shall never be able to walk the streets holding you close. It would not be fair to the woman who will come to know me as her husband, even if I pray every day for the carriages to drive on forever and never reach our door. We will never again be able to sleep together with your head on my shoulder …” He bowed his head, and the force of his surrender filled my eyes with tears. I stroked his hair, searching for a consolation that my broken words did not know how to express. He laid his head in my lap and I listened to our tears, his and mine,
as we wept gently together while the sky above us darkened and night extended her cloak.

Then I reached for his hand and made him get up. My tears were on his lips, and without looking at him I climbed the steps to the altar until I was above him.

There was not a breath of wind that night and the sky was dominated by white starlight. The altar stone was cold under me, and against me Hector's skin burning hot.

The wedding of a prince is an affair of state. The throne room was crowded with braziers and its windows barred, and a mass of courtiers welcomed the Hittite princesses and their retinue. Hector stood by the throne in full armor, wrapped in the dark shadow of his discontent, resembling with his reddened eyes a somber god of the underworld. Next to him, Aeneas, seething in his own fury, had clenched his teeth like a dog about to bite; I wondered if that gloomy rage could ever be banished from his invariably miserable face. Beside them sat Priam, indifferent, noticing nothing.

Cassandra was not there. I did not know and never would know if she and Aeneas had talked of what had to be, if they had ever shared anything more than the icy politeness and burning looks that bound them
together. But I did know for certain that it was a day when the doors of the temple of Apollo would remain closed.

I looked over the horde of inquisitive heads attempting one last time to display what was left of their ancient prosperity, and sought Hector's eyes. They seemed neutral, his pain hidden under a glaze of absent melancholy. It was as if he was not there at all, and I only wished I could be a goddess to eliminate the crowd and caress that face I knew as well as my own. I longed to rescue him from that moment. He was now no more than I had once been, just a piece of meat, a head of cattle: the finest bull in Troy about to be sacrificed in exchange for the Hittite virgin and her brother's war chariots.

Paris trod on my foot and rudely pushed me out of the way. Squeezed into the beautiful ceremonial armor which was now too tight for him, he wanted to be there grinning in the front row. I drew back, imagining Cassandra agonizing in her dark attic while I, once Paris's fine trophy, was standing near him for the first time in years. All that was left of our love was a resentful indifference. When the herald announced the Hittites, I closed my eyes. Like Hector, I wished I wasn't there.

A bloody sheet would prove that the royal couple had done their duty, and soon a swollen belly would indicate that the crumbling throne of Asia Minor could hope for an heir. Hector's bride had red hair and green eyes. She was beautiful but too young, barely adolescent. She fled nervously down the corridors like a doe pursued by hunters; and knowing no Greek, could only talk with her own barbarian slave women once the interpreter had left. No one knew how to pronounce her name; they called her Andromache but she would only respond to that name when Hector used it.

After the first night he sent her to live with his sisters, but kept away from me except after dark, so as not to expose her to ridicule. The Hittite woman was unquestionably isolated at the court of Troy. I only saw her once after the wedding, one evening on my way down from
the temple of Apollo when she dropped her veil and stared at me with meaningless defiance and a sort of terrified ferocity. I gradually came to realize that she loved Hector heart and soul with the same sort of unreciprocated adolescent love I had once felt for my ghost. But the strong silent love of my morose prince was the only lasting happiness life had granted me, and I smiled at the thought of that lonely child seeing my beauty as a threat to her. I held my head high like a queen. And when I saw her eyes fill with tears as she understood the pointlessness of her distress, I looked away. I was not coward enough to enjoy being gratuitously cruel.

As for the woman Aeneas married, she was never more than a vague phantom to me. They called her Creusa, meaning “the golden one,” but I don't believe she and I ever exchanged a single look. She fell pregnant on their wedding night, after which Aeneas never touched her again. Paris's twin Polyxena, who shared his particular brand of superficial cynicism, liked to call her “the walking womb” but Creusa paid the highest possible price for her heavy belly. She died giving birth to a fragile child who only lived a month in the icy winds of the next winter. Its father buried the infant outside the walls, with only Hector present. I never saw Aeneas shed a tear; his scowl never altered.

*

Hector was asleep, his great body abandoned to my arms on his narrow bed. His room was unchanged since the first time I'd seen it. Dark shadows fluctuated and lengthened into bizarre shapes in the low trembling flame of the lamp as the oil burned low before dawn. I watched Hector and listened to my heart beating calmly in time with his. His face was tense even in sleep, and I wished I could have smoothed out the deep furrows carved by worry at the corners of his mouth. His long dark hair mixed with mine, locks of the darkest chestnut with copper-colored curls on the coarse wool coverlet.

Spring was not far off; its scent was in the air, and the singing of the birds in the garden trees hinted at a thaw. There were fewer fires burning among the Greek ships. Agamemnon must have known about the alliance concluded with the Hittites after eight years of siege, because Greek lookouts now patrolled the coast road and parties of Trojans had run into them in the forests of Ida. But apart from this the plain was still empty, the sea abandoned and Greece far away; and their houses on the shore were beginning to show their age. The Scaean Gates were still sealed shut and looked as if they had never been open.

I counted the length of the siege on Hector's face and wondered how he would look in another twenty years. Cassandra made no more prophecies, just silently
watched time slipping through her fingers. If I asked her about the dark future her cries had once foretold she would not answer. Lightly touching Hector's neck I prayed to the indulgent spirit that had put him in my path to grant me what I had so long dreamed of in vain: to have someone to grow old with.

A bird broke into song outside the window and I got up, carefully arranging the sheet over Hector's body. The shutter yielded easily to my fingers, and I stood for a long moment watching the last frost adorn the chilly calm of the garden. Then the ground was ripped from under my feet, and as I fell I heard Hector shout my name.

I woke hours later, one of the many casualties in the long hospital behind the temple of Apollo. Cassandra was bending over me with a smile.

“You're not dying, don't worry,” she said, offering me a cup of water.

“We're all going to die, stupid,” I answered back, reaching for the cup with my lips. Cassandra gave a short laugh and helped me to drink.

“What did I tell you? You're doing fine.”

I cautiously moved and felt myself with tentative fingers. My right leg was heavily bruised and a dull throbbing suggested it might be better not to touch the side of my head, but I could see clearly.

“What happened?”

“An earthquake,” Cassandra answered casually, placing the cup on the floor.

I could feel my eyes widening in surprise as I stared at her calm expression. “And you didn't know about it in advance?”

“Of course I did, but none of you would have believed me. But from now on, I think a few people will start to listen to me.”

She briskly collected the cup and pitcher of water and stood up. She had tied her hair back, and looked tired. When I showed surprise she smiled indulgently. “I've told you before, Helen, don't ask me questions if you don't want to know the answers.” She moved away down the narrow corridor between the lines of stretchers laid on the ground, a small soft figure passing between the injured, some of whom were bleeding and most immobile.

It took me a moment to find my voice again. “Cassandra! How are the others?”

“My brother's fine,” she said, scarcely turning. “And the Hittite has just finished bringing her son into the world.”

Slowly and cautiously, I readjusted my body on the strip of cloth under me on the floor. Cassandra watched till I was settled, then hurried briskly away.

Lying stretched out among the dead and dying, I felt as if a space had opened inside me and swallowed my heart and lungs in one single ferocious mouthful. His son! The son I could never have carried, and the child I had left behind.

It was a very quiet day. Some lives finally ended while others slowly clawed their way back to the light, cautious and fearful of every breath of wind. I listened to the emptiness grow wider and my mind went blank as memories and thoughts left me, and I asked myself whether this was death. But it wasn't death, and for five more days I lay there until Callira, who was completely unhurt, came to find me down what was now a wider corridor and held out her hand. “Come home now, your ladyship.”

I made no protest. Grasping her long pale freckled hand, I pulled myself to my feet like an empty sack. Helen of Sparta, Helen of Troy. I walked down the corridor, a sad alley that led to the light of day.

There were signs of the earthquake everywhere. The walls of the citadel were intact and the palace had scarcely suffered a scratch, but the houses of the lower city had collapsed as if built from straw. Rubble still carpeted the twisting streets. On the beach a pitiless giant seemed to have knocked over the stone houses the Greeks had built, like a capricious child with the pieces of a game, which were now lying spread over the sand. Something sparked back into life inside me, and from high above the plain I looked for traces of Achilles and Diomedes. Had the earth claimed them? But the beach was too far away for me to see; I shook my head and called myself
a fool. Callira took my arm again. “You need to rest. Maybe later …”

“No.” I lifted my head before she could say any more. “Don't call Hector. He has other things to think about.”

Callira's blue eyes grew sad. “He came to see you every day, but Cassandra wouldn't let him in.”

“Cassandra was right. No more games, Callira.”

She said nothing more. We walked the rest of the way down in silence.

I did not look for Hector, nor did he come to me. I waited in my rooms; waiting because I had been able to read Cassandra's prophecy in her rapid steps. The peace was over, and soon Ares would no longer slumber beneath the sandy plain.

Like a tortoise retiring into her shell, I vanished into my long clothes and solitary garden walks, no longer climbing the slippery cobbles to the temple of Apollo and its polluted peace. Cassandra sent me messages during that long earthquake-ridden summer, but Callira was my only companion, and it was she who told me about Scamandrius, Hector's son. He had fine dark hair; his eyes were as pale as the eyes of mountain Hittites but deep and wise, and his childish expression reflected the uncertain destiny of our times. I
shrugged my shoulders and went on weaving, asking myself whether those cubits of cloth could ever be anything more than a huge shroud for all my dreams.

Autumn came, bringing with it the last aftershock. I stood in the courtyard waiting for it to end, warned as always by Cassandra; these were light tremors, as if the earth were stretching herself, to be ready for her long winter sleep. I had long been in the habit of keeping my more valuable possessions in chests padded with wool and now, wrapped in nothing but a shawl, I faced the brusque reawakening of the earth as nothing worse than an irritating habit. Like me, the Trojan court was waiting, but an invisible wall separated us, the Trojans caught asleep with disordered hair and swollen eyes, while the foreign women, Callira and I, stood motionless near the outer wall.

I could see the royal family grouped near the stairs; Polyxena's long hair impeccable even in the light haze, and her tunic arranged in perfect folds as she chattered uninhibitedly with her sisters. Somewhere beyond the screen formed by the daughters of Priam stood Andromache; I could imagine her pale complexion in the dawn; perhaps she was holding little Scamandrius in her arms, unwilling to entrust him to a slave girl. My gaze wandered across the empty pavement between us, and I felt a sense of loss as I watched that great
imperfect family with which my own had never assimilated.

I tried and failed to imagine myself in Polyxena's place, with the lovely Leda beside me, perfumed with the essences she sprinkled among her bedclothes; and for a moment I thought I saw Castor and Pollux among the guard drawn up at the gate—with their closed helms and fierce looks those men could have been Spartans, and this city lost in mist could have been Sparta. But earthquakes had never shaken the Peloponnese, and nothing was left now of my family but ashes blown on the winds. Only Hermione still carried in her veins the blood of Leda and Tyndareus, of Castor and Pollux, and I wondered whether she was at least a little like them, carrying stamped on her face that remote parentage, a heredity of centuries written in the features of a child. Child? A girl now, almost a woman. Who knows, perhaps by now with Menelaus absent they had already married her off, but to whom? All the young men of Greece had been passing the best years of their lives before the walls of Troy.