Valerio Manfredi: Odysseus: The Return

‘What about your wives? The girls who’ve been waiting for you all these years? Your children, who were still babbling when you left them. Why aren’t you thinking of them?’

‘We’re dead for them, Odysseus. Dead, understand? The girls we were betrothed to will have found other husbands, our children were too young then to remember us now; it’s as if we never existed for them. . For ten years we’ve gone into combat almost every day. We’ve done nothing but kill, wound, slaughter. Our hands are soaked with blood and the screams of the dying never leave our ears. .

‘Is it easy for you to sleep at night, brave, cunning Odysseus? Well, it wasn’t for me. I couldn’t sleep. I was surrounded by ghosts, shrieking spirits. They bit away at my heart.’

He held out the flower to me again. ‘With this you forget everything, understand? Everything.’

‘Even our homeland?’ I challenged him. ‘Her fragrance? Her forests and sea?’

‘Certainly! That as well. Do you really think that after having lived as we did for as long as we did, we can return home as if nothing had ever happened? Hoping to find that nothing has changed? Return to what? To our women, who will have gone off with someone else? To our parents who’ve grown old waiting for us? To our children, who won’t recognize us? Do you think that the blood and carnage of our nightmares won’t find us there?

‘Our land is here, Odysseus, where we’ve found peace and oblivion. Oblivion, king of Ithaca, understand? Oblivion. .’

‘Burn the ships,’ said another, ‘and join us here. We’ll be happy together, and together we can forget.’

I drew my most trusted men aside. ‘They’re under the effects of a powerful drug,’ I said. ‘How else could they forget their homes, their parents, their children and their wives? We have to get them away from here at any cost, as quickly as we can. The others, back at the ships, will already be worried about us.’

‘It won’t be easy,’ said Antiphus. ‘There are so many of them and they seem set on staying.’

‘I’ve seen many coils of rope made with dry grasses. We’ll use it to tie them up, one by one, and we’ll drag them back if we have to. As soon as the effect of the drug contained in those cursed flowers wears off, they’ll go back to being themselves again, you’ll see.’

We waited until night fell, when everyone had lain down to rest. Our comrades, who had no homes to go to, were stretched out on mats near the fire, and this made our task much easier.

‘Let’s wait a little longer,’ I said. ‘They’ve eaten many of those flowers. If we wait for them to take effect, the men will be deeply asleep.’

When their breathing became heavy and they all seemed to have fallen into a dead slumber, I signalled to my men and we began, swift and quiet as ghosts, to tie their hands behind their backs, ring the rope around their necks and then fetter them one to another.

One of them awoke and cried out: ‘What are you doing? No! No! We don’t want to go. Leave us here!’ He tried to rouse the others: ‘Wake up! Wake up! They’re taking us away!’ But by this time they were all tied up and we began to drag them away from the clearing. We’d done a good job, but nonetheless I had twenty armed warriors draw up on either side of the column. Those posted at the front drove them forward and others made sure that no one escaped at the rear.

As we began to climb the hill, we saw the dark-skinned inhabitants of that land leave their shacks to watch what was happening. The moon shed a bright glow and we were all clearly visible to them, and they to us. They did not try to come closer. Our bronze armour glittered in the light of the moon. They stayed where they were but they began to sing. A long, sad lament with two different tones: the subtle, clear voices of the women and the deeper, more intense ones of the men . I’ll never forget it as long as I live. Perhaps that was their way of saying goodbye to the men to whom they’d offered hospitality in such a magic and marvellous way, in their boundless, timeless land. They watched them being dragged away like animals snared in nooses and they wept for them. Their song became shriller and more penetrating, like a funeral wail for people who were going to their deaths. That’s what I heard, and so did my comrades, walking silently with their spears in hand and their shields on their arms. The others, stumbling along with their wrists and necks bound, seemed to understand the meaning of those voices and when any of them raised their faces to look at me I saw them streaked with tears.

We walked all night without ever stopping and all the next day, resting only to regain our strength and drink. We never said a word to our unhappy comrades nor did they ever speak to us, but I could see that they were beginning to look reality in the face again and that they were bitterly bemoaning what they had lost.

I had to lash the men we’d saved to the oars and to the rowing benches, and I put my most loyal comrades in command of the ships we had found abandoned: Eurylochus, Euribates, Antiphus and a few others, all armed to the teeth. Then I gave the signal to set sail.

I didn’t want to linger a moment longer in that place. The fascination of that mysterious and magnificent land had wormed into my own heart and I wanted to stop any of the other men from becoming ensnared in the tantalizing world of the flower-eaters. My desire to return home was what was keeping me alive. I would not give up trying for any reason in the world, nor would I allow my men to give up. I was the one responsible for their lives and their futures. I was duty-bound to bring them back to their parents, who were surely wasting away as they tried to keep alive the feeble hope of seeing their sons again. I had taken these men to war and I had already lost too many of them on the bloody fields of Troy; I could not lose any more on our return journey.

I often asked myself whether news of the fall of Troy had reached the land of Achaia. Some of the warriors had certainly made their return. Had the news flown from Pylos to the shores of Ithaca and the rooms of my palace, raising the hopes of Penelope and my son Telemachus? Were they waiting, watching? Wait for me, I beg of you, wait for me! I’ll come back, as I swore I would when I left, to you, my bride, and to you, my son.

The wind was driving us elsewhere. Where, I couldn’t say. The sun seemed to perch at the centre of the sky for an endless time, only to dive like a flaming meteor into the horizon. The night stars seldom sparkled, often hiding behind the clouds, and it seemed more difficult every day to get our bearings.

I tried to inspire the confidence of my comrades. I wanted them to believe that I knew which direction we were sailing in, but the sea just became wider and more deserted day after day. I realized that since the storm had driven us away from Cape Malea, we hadn’t ever encountered another ship, not even a fisherman’s boat. The world had changed. I couldn’t recognize the sky and the sea and they didn’t recognize me. My goddess wasn’t speaking to me, never appeared to me. Perhaps her gaze hadn’t been able to penetrate the wall of fog that separated our world from the one we’d found: a world so unlike our own, peopled by pure, innocent, unarmed men.

We sailed all that day and the next. After the sun had set, we prudently hauled up the sail halfway, as the lookouts at the bow searched for a landing place while scanning the darkness for possible hazards or traps. We didn’t want to spend the night at sea. The moon, which had been guiding us, hid behind the clouds and a thick fog enveloped us. There was no light anywhere. We lit some torches, using the braziers, and tried to lighten the choppy surface of the sea. I ordered my men to haul the sails in completely and to proceed with the oars. We called out to one another, from one ship to the next, so we could stay in touch and not lose heart. Then, all at once, the sea flattened in front of us.