Valerio Mafredi - The Oath

How long have I been walking? I don’t remember any more, I can’t count days or months. Is that the moon, the sun? I can’t tell. The night star will sometimes light up the infinite fields of snow with an intensity like that of the sun, while the daytime star rises from the fog-shrouded horizon like a pale moon. The ice reflects the light like water does.

How long has it been since I’ve seen a man? How long since I’ve seen springtime, the sea, the holm oaks and myrtles that nestle between the crags of the mountainside? I have met wolves. Bears. They haven’t hurt me, haven’t attacked me. I haven’t laid a hand on my bow and I’ve survived all the same. I must; so that my journey may come to an end.

The last journey.

I’ve learned to talk with myself. It soothes me, and keeps my mind from evaporating. I miss my bride, her arms so soft and white. I miss her warm breasts and her black, black, black eyes. I miss my son, my boy, the only child I’ve fathered. When I left him he was still sleeping. Children sleep so soundly. He surely hates me: he had waited so long for me.

I miss my goddess with her green eyes, her perfect lips that have never given a kiss to a god nor to a mortal. She leaves no prints even if she walks at my side. Her breath won’t condense: cold, it is, like the snow. She loved me once. She would appear in disguise but I recognized her anyway, anywhere.. Now she doesn’t speak to me any more, or is it I who cannot hear her?

Are you listening to me? Listening to me, son of a small island, son of a bitter fate? You incorrigible liar. . How often have you plunged your bare hands in the snow to wash them of blood? But you’ve never succeeded. You’re being watched, can you feel it? Walk, walk, journey on, on and on, as the horizon slips away, escapes you, and the land never ends. Vast, boundless, shapeless and sterile as the sea, flat as a dead calm.

And yet, although you may not believe me, I am a king.

You, a king? Don’t make me laugh.

Laugh as long as you like, for I am a king. Without a kingdom, without subjects, without friends, without, without, without. . but I am indeed a king. I carried out great endeavours, commanded a great number of ships. . Warriors. Friends. Comrades. Dead. I’m cold. Can you hear me? I’m cold! Where are all of you? Near me, here? Beneath my feet? Under the ice? None of you can see your cold breath either. All invisible.

On, on and on. I don’t remember the last time I ate.

I don’t know why my fate cannot play itself out, why I can’t live like most men do, in a house, with a family, eating food prepared three times a day.

Athena. Do you still love me? Am I still your favourite? Perhaps this is my madness: my mind is connected to mysteries greater than I am, mysteries that I cannot fathom. The feet that go on and on, wrapped in the hides of rabbits that I have eaten, are my only way of seeing. There is no end to their journey, save the one prophesied by the seer who one moonless night I called up from the nether world. Where are they heading? A place like any other, but I will not know until I get there. I’ve lost count of the days and the nights. I never kept count, actually, and I don’t know how long I’ve been walking. I don’t even know how old I am. Certainly not young any more.

A mountain.

Rising alone like an island in the middle of the sea. And there’s a cave. Refuge from the wind cutting at my face, the sleet piercing my eyes.

A cave. It’s warm inside, on the bottom, where the wind has no room to move.

A rabbit is here. White on white. Hard to take aim, even harder to withstand hunger. How sweet would it be to give in to exhaustion, to let myself die slowly. Death, coming for me softly. Who would ever find me here?

Raw-boned, baring starved teeth. .

Caught. Skinned. Devoured. Me, or the rabbit. What difference does it make? Since then, bones have piled up in front of my cave. And memories in my mind. Spring will return and I will meet a man who will ask me a question that I must answer. I’ll have to remember everything, then. Remember the screams and the groans, the echoes of agony. On the floor of this cave lies the oar I was carrying on my shoulder. I found it abandoned on the shore at Ithaca one morning after I had returned — wreckage from some old shipwreck. How long had it been floating on the sea? Years. I recognized it from the butterfly carved into the handle. A handle once gripped by a comrade of mine. The fourth oar on the right. Old friend, asleep now in the dark of the abyss. . but you sent me a sign. Time to start out again.

My ship. I miss her. Curved flanks like a woman’s, soft and sensual. Like my green-eyed goddess. Lying broken in pieces on the bottom of the sea. My heart weeps. Stop weeping, heart of mine! You’ve been through much worse. Endless misfortunes, yes. Remember, try, at least, in your sleep. Remember it all. Memories are sweet: birth, life. The future is death, the death of a hero, the death of a rabbit. No difference, that is the awful truth.

The dim light is swallowed up by the night. The wind starts racing again over the plain, sighing in the darkness, rousing the long howl of the wolves, demanding snow, snow, snow. What long nights! The night will never end. Was there ever a sun that rose over mountains mantled with whispering oaks? My sun-kissed island, silent under the full moon, fragrant with rosemary and asphodel: did you ever really exist?

And yet one day long ago a baby was born on the island, in the palace on the mountain, an only son. He did not cry, but tried to talk at once, imitating the sounds he’d heard in his mother’s womb.

Me.

They called me Odysseus. It was my grandfather Autolykos, king of Acarnania, who gave me that name when he arrived at the palace a month after my birth. I soon realized that other children had fathers and I did not. At night, before going to sleep, I’d ask my nurse: ‘Mai, where is my father?’

‘He left with other kings and warriors to find a treasure in a faraway place.’

‘And when is he coming back?’

‘I don’t know. No one does. When you go to sea you never know when you’ll be back. There are storms, pirates, rocks. Your ship can even be destroyed, but maybe you manage to swim to shore, and survive. Then you have to wait until another ship comes by to save you and that may take months, or years. If a pirate vessel should stop instead, you’ll be snatched up and sold as a slave in the next port. It’s a risky life that sailors lead. The sea shelters any number of terrible monsters, mysterious creatures that live in her depths and rise to the surface on moonless nights. . but now you must sleep, my little one.’

‘Why did he go to look for a treasure?’

‘Because all the most powerful warriors of Achaia were going. How could he not join them? One day the singers will tell of this tale and the names of those who took part will be remembered for all eternity.’

I nodded my head as if I approved but I really couldn’t understand why he had to leave. Why should you risk your life just so someone can sing about you one day and tell of how brave you’d been to leave home and risk your life?

‘Why do I have to sleep with you, mai ? Why can’t I sleep with my mother?’

‘Because your mother is the queen and she can’t sleep with someone who wets the bed.’

‘I don’t wet the bed.’

‘Good,’ said the nurse, ‘so starting tomorrow you can sleep on your own.’ And that’s how it went. My mother, Queen Anticlea, had me moved to a room all my own with an oak bed decorated with inlaid bone. She had a fine woollen blanket embroidered with rich purple threads brought to me.