Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

But he didn’t argue. He shook his head. After a while he said, pursuing his thought, “It was a storm that brought them together, too. While they were out hunting. They got separated from the rest of the hunting party. There was rain, hail, they took refuge in a cave. And so…”

“Did they marry?” I asked after a while.

“Dido took their love for marriage, called it marriage. He did not. He was right.”

“Why?”

“Not even need and love can defeat fate, Lavinia. Aeneas’ gift is to know his fate, what he must do, and do it. In spite of need. In spite of love.”

“So what did he do?”

“He left her.”

“He ran away?”

“He ran away.”

“What did she do?”

“She killed herself.”

I had not expected that. I thought she would send out ships after Aeneas, pursue him, take fiery revenge. I could not like this African queen but I could not possibly despise her. Yet suicide seemed a coward’s answer to betrayal. At last I said so.

“You do not know what despair is,” the poet said gently. “May you never know.”

I accepted that. I knew what despair was. It was where my mother lived after her sons died. But I had not lived there myself.

“It was a hard death,” he said. “Her sword went wide of the heart, and the wound killed her only slowly. She told them to light the pyre she lay on before she was dead. He saw the great fire of it from out at sea.”

“And knew what it was?”

“No. Maybe.”

“His soul must cringe in him every time he thinks of that. Weren’t his people ashamed of him?”

“Even if he’d called himself king there, it would never have been their country. And Dido had stopped building the city, dropped the reins of government. She’d lost her self-respect, she couldn’t think of anything but him. Things weren’t going right. They were glad to get him away from there.” After a time he said, “He did see Dido, down in the underworld. She turned away. She refused to speak to him.”

That seemed only right. But there was an awful sadness in the story, an awful shame and sorrow, an unbearable injustice. I felt so sorry for all three of them, Creusa, Dido, Aeneas, that I could not say anything. We sat a long time in silence.

“Tell me of happier things,” the poet said in his beautiful, gentle voice. “How do you spend your days?”

“You know how the daughter of a house spends her days.”

“Yes, I do. I had an older sister, in Mantua. But this is not Mantua, and our father wasn’t a king…” He waited; I said nothing. He said, “On feast days the chief men of the city come to dine at the king’s table, and visitors from other cities of Latium, and perhaps allies from farther away—and your suitors, of course. Tell me about them.”

I sat for a while in the darkness. The rain had passed over and stars were beginning to shine overhead and through the leaves of the forest around us. “I come here to get away from them. I don’t want to talk about them, please.”

“Not even Turnus? Isn’t he very handsome, very brave?”

“Yes.”

“Not handsome and brave enough to move a girl’s heart?”

“Ask my mother,” I said.

At that he was silent. When he spoke again he had changed his tone. “Who are your friends, then, Lavinia?”

“Silvia. Maruna. Some of the other girls. Some of the old women.”

“Silvia who has a pet stag?”

“Yes. We saw it down this way, Maruna and I. It was following a doe, just like a dog after a bitch. A dog with antlers. It made us laugh.”

“Males in love are ridiculous,” he said. “They can’t help it.”

“How do you know about Silvia’s stag?”

“It came to me.”

“You know everything, don’t you?”

“No. I know very little. And what I thought I knew of you—what little I thought of at all—was stupid, conventional, unimagined. I thought you were a blonde!…But you can’t have two love stories in an epic. Where would the battles fit? In any case, how could one possibly end a story with a marriage?”

“It does seem more like a beginning than an end,” I said.

We both brooded.

“It’s all wrong,” he said. “I will tell them to burn it.”

Whatever he meant, I did not like the sound of it. “And then look back from out at sea and see the great pyre flaming?” I said.

He gave his short laugh. “You have a cruel streak, Lavinia.”

“I don’t think so. Maybe I wish I did. Maybe I’ll need to be cruel.”

“No. No. Cruelty is for the weak.”

“Oh, not only the weak. Isn’t a master stronger than the slave he beats? Wasn’t Aeneas cruel in leaving Dido? But she was the weak one.”

He stood up, a tall shadow in the dimness. He paced back and forth a little. He said: “In the underworld, Aeneas met an old friend, the Trojan prince Deiphobos. Paris, who ran off with Helen, was killed in the war. So the Trojans gave Helen to his brother Deiphobos.”

“Why didn’t they put her out the gate and tell her to go back to her husband?”

“The Trojan women asked that question; but the Trojan men didn’t hear it… So, then, the Greeks took the city, and Menelaus came looking for his wife, the woman they fought the war for. And Helen met him. She took her old husband to the bedroom where her new husband was sound asleep. He hadn’t heard the sounds of battle. She hadn’t wakened him. She’d stolen his sword. So he woke to his death, the Greek stabbing him, hacking him, chopping off his hands, slicing his face in half, crazy for blood, and the woman looking on. And so Deiphobos went down into the dark. Down there, years after, Aeneas saw him, his shadow, still maimed, mutilated, unhealed. They talked a little, but the guide broke in—no time for this, Aeneas must hurry on. And the murdered man said, ‘Go on, go, my glory. I am gone. I join the crowd, return to darkness. I hope you find a better fate.’ And speaking, he turned away.”

I sat in silence. I wanted to cry, but had no tears.

“I will be gone soon,” the poet said. “I will join the crowd, return to darkness.”

“Not yet—”

“Keep me here. Keep me here, Lavinia. Tell me it is better to be alive, better to be a slave living than Achilles dead. Tell me I can finish my work!”

“If you never finish it, it will never end,” I said, speaking only to speak, saying what came into my head, to give him some comfort. “Anyway, how are you going to end it, if not with a marriage? With a murder? Do you have to decide how it ends before you get to the end?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t, in fact. It’s not exactly a matter of deciding. Rather of finding out. Or, as it now stands, of giving up, because I haven’t the strength to go on. That’s the trouble. I am weak. So the end will be cruel.” He paced back and forth once, between me and the altar. I could hear no sound of his steps on the earth. But finally he sighed, a long, rather noisy sigh, and sat down again, his arms round his knees. “Tell me what you and Silvia do, what you talk about. Tell me about her deer. Tell me how you make the salt. Tell me when you spin, when you weave. Did your mother teach you those arts? Tell me how you unlock and clean out the storeroom early in summer, and leave it open for a few days, praying to the Penates that it be refilled with the harvest…”

“You know it all.”

“No. Only you can tell me.”

So I told him what he asked, and comforted him with what he knew.

I spent the next day alone in the forest of Albunea. The air was heavy under the trees, and the sulfur smell stopped my breath when I went near the springs. Wandering away, I found a path up the steep hill, almost a crag, that rises up over the forest. Clearings at the top gave a wide view west to the bright line that was the sea. I sat up there in the sunlight in the thin grass, my back against a fallen log. I had my spindle and a bag of wool; a woman usually carries some of her Penates with her. I was spinning the very finest thread for a summer toga or palla, so my light bag of wool would last me a good while. I sat and spun and thought and gazed out over the hills and woods of Latium, all green with May. At midday I ate a little cheese and spelt bread and found a spring to drink from. There were shepherds’ lettuce and watercress growing at the spring, and I ate that, too, though I had intended to be very sparing, even perhaps to fast; but fasting comes hard to me. Then I explored the hilltop a little more, and when the sun was halfway between high heaven and earth I made my way down into the depths of the woods again. I passed the stinking springs on the windward side and came again to the altar place. There I slept a little, for I had had little sleep the night before. When I woke, in the dusk, big white moths were fluttering in the air within the sacred wall, rising and falling, circling round about one another in an airy maze, wonderful to see. I watched them sleepily, and through their dance I saw my poet standing near the altar.