The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (52 page)
Others said that, when Odysseus got back to Ithaca, Penelope had already let all one hundred and eight suitors have their way with her. And they were the fathers of Pan. Odysseus’s footsteps echoed in the desolate corridors of the palace, as the suitors lay drenched in blood and Penelope slept on. He opened the door to a room he didn’t remember being there. It was completely empty. In the darkness a child with a sly look on his face was watching him. Two delicate horns sprouted from his curls, and his feet were like a goat’s. Two shiny hooves poked out from the hare’s pelt the baby Pan was wrapped in. Odysseus immediately closed the door. Without saying a word, he went down to the harbor and once again set sail from Ithaca. He didn’t know where to, and this time he was alone.
The suitors’ bodies made a carpet of flesh, blood, gore, and dust. Outside the palace hall, in the courtyard, the twelve unfaithful serving maids swung in the wind, hanged. Everything else was still, save for the jaws of the dogs fighting over Melanthius’s testicles and penis.
Penelope slept on. Her sleep this morning was the sweetest she’d had in twenty years. She sank into irresponsible pleasure, let a weight force itself down on her eyelids, while from behind the door and through the thick walls came the thud of falling bodies and the high-pitched twang of the bow. When Eurycleia woke her, saying that Odysseus had come back and killed the suitors, Penelope was scornful of the old woman’s excitement and dishevelment. For Penelope immediacy was an evil. All her life had been a shrewd avoidance of immediacy. And just as her husband, Odysseus, used to lower his eyes so he could think, his face hidden
from all around him, so Penelope, on coming down the big stairway, would lift her tunic up over her cheeks so as to give nothing away in her expression. But now she must go down there again, to greet—they said—the newly returned Odysseus.
The hall was empty and smelled of sulfur. The men had been using sulfur and fire to try to hide the stench of slaughtered flesh. Penelope and Odysseus found themselves sitting down face to face in the glow of the fire. Once again Odysseus lowered his eyes. Penelope’s gaze ran over him feature by feature. In that moment of mute tension they were at once close and hostile as never before. They were two “hearts of iron,” two beings walled up behind the defenses of the mind, occasionally using the weapons of strength and beauty but then immediately withdrawing to their invisible fortresses. Long used to the solitary life, they were reluctant to recognize someone with whom to share their own monologues. Penelope is described as
períphrōn
,
echéphrōn
; Odysseus as
polýmētis
—all words that suggest the supremacy of mind: as artificer of a shrewd control, in Penelope’s case, of constant and complex invention in Odysseus’s. More than the complicity of the flesh, they shared the complicity of intelligence. But intelligence is isolated and distrustful; thus, before recognizing each other, they clashed.
Their son Telemachus couldn’t understand this. He was angry with his mother for being so cold. Penelope answered that she would only feel able to recognize Odysseus if he gave her one of the “signs that only they knew about.” Upon which, a small smile crossed Odysseus’s face. Yes, Penelope too wanted to “put him to the test.” That, in the end, was the one constant in his life. Even Athena, the goddess who protected him, had allowed the suitors to insult him so that “sorrow might bite even deeper into the heart of Odysseus, son of Laertes.” And right to the end, when the battle with the suitors had already begun and in the form of a swallow the goddess was perched on a beam to watch the massacre, even then she had chosen to “put his strength and courage to the test.” One after another, favors and desertions formed
an unending series of ups and downs in his life, the only link between the two being Odysseus’s capacity to endure both good fortune and bad. Every good and bad fortune is a test: the sovereignty of the mind lies in recognizing them, in dealing with them as such, in getting through them with the secretly indifferent curiosity of the traveler.
Odysseus rose from his seat and began to give out orders. It was as though the clock had been turned back twenty years. Still Penelope said nothing. Odysseus had his servants wash him and rub him with oil. Athena appeared to him again, “pouring down grace on his head and chest.” And now Penelope recognized him. But, before letting her knees go weak, she wanted to wring at least one of their secret signs out of him. With an authoritative tone to her voice, she ordered Eurycleia to move Odysseus’s bed. And just this once Odysseus rose to the bait. No one could move his bed, he said, unless they chopped it in two first. He had made it with his own hands from a huge olive trunk. The bedroom had been built around the trunk.
It was the sign Penelope was waiting for. And now she let her knees give and, embracing Odysseus, wept. Odysseus wept too, for a long time. When he started talking again, he said nothing of the house and the woman he had come back to. He spoke of tests again, of one last test that loomed in the future. “Woman, we haven’t reached the end of our trials; a great, hazardous, and extraordinary task still awaits me, and I will have to see it through.” Odysseus’s first words to Penelope after she recognized him thus looked forward to a new test and a new desertion. But tests were also their secret language. What separated them in life brought them together in the mind. Penelope was already prepared to look to the future again. She asked for details about this trial. Odysseus spoke of new wanderings, of having to travel from city to city until he reached, alone as ever, the people “who know nothing of the sea.” Penelope merely said in her sober way: “If the gods plan to grant you a better old age, then you may hope that there will be a way out of your troubles.” Eurynome came forward with a torch and led them off to their bed with its mighty roots.
Z
EUS IS NEVER RIDICULOUS, BECAUSE HIS dignity is of no concern to him. “
Non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur / Maiestas et amor
,” says Ovid, master of matters erotic. To seduce a woman with a bundle of lightning bolts in one’s hand would be injudicious, and not even very exciting. But a white bull, an eagle, a swan, a false satyr, a stallion, a stream of gold, a blaze of fire: these are divine. Only when he assumes these forms does Zeus manage to “leave aside his very being Zeus.” Thus when the god came down from Olympus to seduce some mortal woman, the lightning was left behind, forgotten. Zeus preferred to be unarmed when he exposed himself to the amorous gadfly that tormented and aroused him just as it did the lowliest of his subjects. Eros is the helplessness of that which is sovereign: it is strength abandoning itself to something elusive, something that stings.
Zeus was seducing the Nymph Pluto when Ge, avenger of all the victims of the Olympian age, nodded to her son Typhon, as one assassin giving the go-ahead to another. A huge body stretched across heaven and earth: an arm, one of the two hundred attached to that body, reached out to Olympus, the fingers searching behind a rock from which rose rags of smoke. Typhon’s hand closed around Zeus’s bundle of thunderbolts. The sovereign god had lost his weapon. Olympus was terror-struck. The gods fled like a stampeding herd.
They shed the human forms that made them too recognizable and unique. Trembling, they camouflaged themselves beneath animal skins: ibis, jackals, dogs. And they flew toward Egypt, where they would be able to blend in among the hundreds and thousands of other ibis, jackals, and dogs, the motionless, painted guardians of tombs and temples.
Europa’s fine hair was still shrinking to a speck that would lose itself in the wide expanse of sea when King Agenor called together his sons Cilix, Phoenix, Cepheus, Thasus, and Cadmus. He commanded them to go and find their sister. They were to never show their faces in Sidon again unless they had Europa with them. The sons had already traveled for years with their father through Egypt, Assyria, and Phoenicia. Now they had to set out again, and this time alone. Thus began the long wanderings of Cadmus. His brothers set out too but were soon distracted from the quest that had driven them from their home. Cadmus thought of the bull, the bull “that no mortal can find.”
Still wandering about in search of his sister, he reached the Cilician mountains. He was walking through dense woodland when a flock of birds flew over his head with a convulsed whirring of wings, heading south. Cadmus sensed a sudden emptiness above and beneath him. He didn’t know that that flock of birds were the Olympians, fleeing to Egypt. Olympus was uninhabited now, a museum in the night. And in a cave a few yards from Cadmus, although he hadn’t found the place yet, lay Zeus, helpless. Wrapping himself around the god’s body, Typhon had managed to wrench his adamantine sickle from him and had cut through the sinews of his hands and feet. Now, drawn out from his body, Zeus’s sinews formed a bundle of dark, shiny stalks, not unlike the bundle of lightning bolts that lay beside them, although these were bright and smoking. Zeus’s body could just be glimpsed through the shadows, an abandoned sack. Wrapped in a bearskin, his sinews were being guarded by Delphine, half girl, half snake. And out from the cave drifted the breath of Typhon’s many mouths, Typhon with his hundred animal heads and the thousands of snakes that framed
them. The Olympians were routed. Already nature was slowly degenerating. And the only witness to the scene was that traveler lost in the woods dressed as a shepherd.
Cadmus felt a loneliness no one had ever felt before. Nature’s soul was fading, order gasped its death rattle, destiny shrank to a single point, in that wood, before the mouth of that cave, where a Phoenician prince was about to take on a primordial and evil creature, Typhon. Cadmus had no weapons, bar the invisible resources of his mind. He remembered how in his childhood, when he used to follow his father on his travels, the priests of the Egyptian temples had squeezed into his mouth “the ineffable milk of books.” And he remembered the most intense joy he had ever known: one day Apollo had revealed to him, and him alone, “the just music.” What was the
just music?
No one else would ever know, but Cadmus decided to play it to the monster now, a last voice from the deserted world of the gods. Hiding in a thicket of trees, he played his pipes. The notes penetrated Typhon’s cave, rousing him from his happy torpor. Then Cadmus saw some of Typhon’s arms slithering toward him. Head after head rose before him, until the only human one among them spoke to him in a friendly voice. Typhon invited Cadmus to compete with him: pipes versus thunder. He spoke like a bandit in need of company who grabs at the first chance to show off his power. With the bluster of the braggart, he promised him marvelous things, although in this particular moment that braggart really was the sole master of the cosmos. And, as he spoke, he was struggling to imitate Zeus, whom he had long observed with resentment. He told Cadmus he would take him up to Olympus. He would grant him Athena’s body, untouched. And if he didn’t like Athena he could have Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Hebe. Only Hera was out of bounds, because she belonged to him, the new sovereign. Never had anyone been at once so ridiculous and so powerful.
Cadmus contrived to look serious and respectful, but not frightened. He said it was pointless him trying to compete with his pipes. But with a lyre, maybe. He made up a story
of his once having competed with Apollo. And said that, to save his son the embarrassment of being beaten, Zeus had burned his strings to ashes. If only he had some good, tough sinews to make himself a new instrument! With the music of his lyre, Cadmus said, he would be able to stop the planets in their courses and enchant the wild beasts. These words convinced the ingenuous monster, who enjoyed conversation only when it centered on power, immense power, the one thing he was interested in. He agreed. His many heads went back into the cave and then emerged again. In one hand he was holding the shining bundle of Zeus’s sinews. He handed them to Cadmus. He said they were a gift for his guest. He thought this was how sovereigns behaved. Cadmus began to finger the divine sinews like a craftsman examining his materials before getting down to work. Then he went off to build his instrument. He hid Zeus’s sinews beneath a rock. Then he pressed on into the thicket and, skillfully sweetening the tone of his pipes, began to play a tune.
Typhon strained hundreds of ears to listen. He heard the tune and didn’t understand it. But harmony was working on him. Cadmus told him he had invented the composition to celebrate the flight of the gods from Olympus. Typhon wallowed in self-gratification. The music pricked him with its sweet goad. He ventured outside the cave to hear it better. For the first time he felt he understood how Zeus must feel when his eye settled on the breast and hips of a woman about to yield to him. That sensation had always been obscure and impenetrable to Typhon. But now he must learn all about it, if he was to take Zeus’s place. Typhon was immersed in the music, every one of his hundred heads distracted. Zeus took advantage of the situation to sneak out of the cave. Dragging himself across the ground with great effort, he found his sinews behind the rock. A few moments later the bundle of lightning bolts was back in his hand. He had seen the smoke rising from them in the darkness. When Typhon roused himself and went back to the cave, he found it empty.