Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

I lay down. I was tired, and quite soon was asleep.

I woke in the black starless dark and looked past the altar. He was there.

“Poet,” I said.

He said, “Lavinia.”

A light rain was pattering on the ground and on the leaves of the forest. It ceased and began again and ceased.

He came where he had sat before, not far from me, and sat on the ground again, his arms round his knees.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“No. Are you?”

“Yes.”

I wanted to offer him fleeces to keep off the rain, but I knew it was no good.

“The ship is coming into harbor,” he said. His voice was gentle and humorous, charged with passion yet quietly flowing, even when he was not singing his poem. That is what his song was called, he had told me, the first night, an epic poem. “We’ve passed through the arms of the harbor, where Pompey had his blockade of ships. I can feel how the rise and fall of the waves has diminished. I hated that swelling and sinking when I was out at sea, but I miss it now. We’ll be ashore soon, no waves at all. Only a hot, flat bed, and sweat and aching, and more fever and less fever… What an escape some kind god has given me! To be here, in the dark, in the rain, to be cold, shivering—are you shivering, Lavinia?”

“No. I’m fine. I wish—” I didn’t know what to say. “I wish you were well,” I said.

“I’m well enough. I’m very well. I have been granted what few poets are granted. Maybe it’s because I haven’t finished the poem. So I can still live in it. Even while I die I can live in it. And you, you can live in it, be here—be here to talk to me, even if I can’t write. Tell me… Tell me, daughter of King Latinus, how goes it in Latium?”

“The spring was early. Calving and lambing went well. The spelt and barley are tall for the season. Everything is well with the Penates of my house, except the salt is getting low. I’ll have to go down to the salt beds at the mouth of the father river soon, and bring dirty salt back, and clean it and leach it and bake it and soak it and dry it and pound it and all the rest you have to do to make it right.”

“How did you learn to do all that?”

“From the old women.”

“Not from your mother?”

“My mother is from Ardea. They don’t have salt beds nearby, down there. They trade for their salt with houses like ours. That’s why our women know how to make it. We trade it. But the sacred salt, for the salsamola, I have to make that myself. From beginning to end.”

“What would you rather do?”

“Talk with you,” I said.

“What do you want to talk about?”

“The Trojans.”

“What do you want to know about the Trojans?”

I had trouble getting started, but then it came out: “When Troy was burning… His wife Creusa—they were in the streets, trying to escape—He had the child, she was behind him. They got separated. The Greek soldiers killed her. And then she came to him, taller than life, there in the darkness and the burning, and told him he must go on, get out, save his people. And he tried to hold her, three times, but she was only air and shadow.”

He nodded.

“But later on—you said he went down to the underworld, and talked to the shadows of the dead there—later on. Did he meet his wife again there?”

The poet was silent, and then said, “No.”

“He couldn’t find her among so many,” I said, trying to imagine the dead.

“He didn’t look for her.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. And I doubt that I’ll know any more when I get there. We each have to endure our own afterlife… He had lost her. In the fire, in the slaughter, in the streets. Lost her forever. He couldn’t look back. He had his people to look after.”

After a time I asked, “Where did they go after they escaped from Troy?”

“They wandered a long time around the Middle Sea, not knowing where to go, getting it wrong. They came to Sicily and stayed a while. His father died there. They set off again to seek the promised land, but a storm scattered the fleet and threw the ships onto a wild coast in Africa.”

“And what did they do there?”

“Thanked the gods for safe deliverance, and got themselves some venison, and feasted. And then Aeneas and his friend Achates went off to find out what country they were in, and came to a city that was just being built. Carthage it was called, and the people were Phoenicians, and the queen was Dido. And she welcomed them.”

“Tell me about it.”

The poet seemed hesitant. I felt at once that his hesitation had something to do with the queen.

“He fell in love with Queen Dido,” I said, and felt a curious flatness or disappointment as I said it.

“She fell in love with him,” the poet said. His voice was grave. “I think this is not really a story to be told to a young girl, Lavinia.”

“But I am not a young girl. I am ‘ripe now for a man, of full age now for marriage.’ As you said… And I am aware that mar ried women sometimes fall in love with other men. Younger men.” I doubt he heard the dryness in my voice when I said that. He was thinking about the African queen.

“She was a widow. There was nothing wrong about it. Except that her heart and her will ran away with her. She very much needed a king. She was an excellent ruler, her people loved her; they were founding a beautiful city there, everything going very well; but it’s a rare thing for a woman to rule long alone. It makes men uncomfortable. The neighboring kings and chiefs were after her. Courting her, coveting her power, wooing and threatening at the same time. Aeneas came as her savior, her answer to them—a tried warrior, with his own troops—a man born to be a king, but with no country of his own. She needed him before she loved him. She fell in love with his son, first. She took to Ascanius at once, held him and hugged him and promised him good times, and of course the motherless boy liked her, the warmhearted, beautiful, kind, childless woman. And that went to Aeneas’ heart. His son was all the family he had left. He promised to help Dido get her city started. And so…”

A pause.

“One thing led to another,” I said.

“I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.”

I had no idea what a cynic was but I knew what he meant. “I wasn’t speaking in contempt. One thing does lead to another. There’s no harm in that. How else would husbands and wives ever come to love each other? She needed a man. And he was kind and noble and handsome and shipwrecked. She fell in love with him. Any woman would.”

“Let it be an omen,” the poet murmured.

“But did he fall in love with her?”

“Yes. He did. She was beautiful, fiery, passionate. Any man would. But…”

“He was still mourning for Creusa.”

“No. His wife, his city, that was all behind him. Far back. Years and lands and seas between them. He didn’t look back. But he didn’t know how to look forward. He was caught in the moment, in the present time. His father’s death was a hard blow to him. He had depended on Anchises, obeyed him even when the old man led them astray. When he died and took the past with him, Aeneas felt the future was gone too. He didn’t know how to go on. The storm that scattered his fleet and took them off course, to lands they didn’t know—there was a storm like that in his soul. He’d lost his way.”

“What was his way?”

“Here. To Italy. To Latium. He knew that.”

“Why couldn’t his future have been in Africa? Why shouldn’t he stay and help the queen build her city and be happy with her?” I spoke reasonably, though in fact I did not want him to have done that. I counted on the poet’s argument.