Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

“The moths look like souls in the underworld,” I said, still only half awake.

He said, “It is a terrible place. On the far side of the dark river are marshy plains, where you hear crying—little, weak, wailing cries, from the ground, everywhere, underfoot. They are the souls of babies who died at birth or in the cradle, died before they lived. They lie there on the mud, in the reeds, in the dark, wailing. And no one comes.”

I was awake now. I said, “How do you know that?”

“I was there.”

“You were in the underworld? With Aeneas?”

“Who else would I be with?” he said. He looked about uncertainly. His voice was low and dull. He went on, hesitant, “It was the Sybil who guided Aeneas… What man did I guide? I met him in a wood, like this. A dark wood, in the middle of the road. I came up from down there to meet him, to show him the way… But when was that? Oh, this dying is a hard business, Lavinia. I am very tired. I can’t think straight any more.”

“You’re not thinking straight about the babies,” I said. “Why would they be punished for not having lived? How could their souls be there before they had time to grow souls? Are the souls of dead kittens there, and of the lambs we sacrifice, and of miscarried fetuses? If not them, then why babies? If you invented that marsh full of miserable dead crying babies, it was a misinvention. It was wrong.”

I was extremely angry. I used the second most powerful word I know, wrong, nefas, against the order of things, unspeakable, unsacred. There will be many words for it, but that was the one I knew. It is only the shadow, the opposite, the undoing, of the great word fas, the right, what one must do.

He sat down, doubling up his tall shadowy figure, and I could see how wearily he moved, how he bowed his head down like a man spent, defeated; but I would not have pity on him.

“If cruelty comes of weakness, as you said, then you are very weak,” I said.

He did not answer.

After a long time I said, “I think you are strong.” My lips and voice quivered as I spoke, for I did pity him, though I did not want to, and my heart was full of tears.

“If it is wrong, I will take it out of the poem, child,” he said. “If I am permitted to.”

I wanted so much to be able to help him, to give him a fleece to sit on or my own toga to put round his shoulders, for he sat hunched as if he was shivering cold. But I could do nothing for him, and could touch him only with my voice.

“Who is it that permits or forbids you?”

“The gods. My fate. My friends. Augustus.”

I knew what he meant by his fate and his friends. At least I knew what the words meant. The others I was not certain of. And I did not know who his friends were and whether he could trust them. As for his fate, we none of us know that.

“But surely you’re a free man,” I said at last. “Your work is your own.”

“It was till I got sick,” he said. “Then I began to lose my hold on it, and now I think I’ve lost it. They’ll publish it unfinished. I can’t stop them. And I haven’t got the strength to finish it. It ends with a murder, as you said. Turnus’ death. Why does it? Who cares about Turnus? The world is full of fine fearless young men eager to kill and be killed. There’ll always be enough of them for every war.”

“Who kills him?”

The poet did not answer my question. He only said after a long time, “It’s not the right ending.”

“Tell me the right ending.”

Again he was silent for a long time. “I can’t,” he said.

It was almost dark. Leaves and branches that had stood out sharp black against deep blue had begun to blur away into the dimness of night. Venus shone for a minute low between dark tree trunks in the west, and I prayed to the power of its beauty. There was no wind at all, and no bird or creature made any noise.

“I think I know why I came to you, Lavinia. I have wondered—Of all the people of my poem, why were you the one who called my spirit? Why not my great, my dear Aeneas? Why can’t I see him with my living eyes as I saw him so often with the eyes of my art?”

His voice was extremely low, almost breathless. I strained to listen. I did not understand much of what he said, then.

“Because I did see him. And not you. You’re almost nothing in my poem, almost nobody. An unkept promise. No mending that now, no filling your name with life, as I filled Dido’s. But it’s there, that life ungiven, there, in you. So now, at the end, when it’s too late, you have it to give to me. My life. My earth of Italy, my hope of Rome, my hope.”

There was a desperation in his voice that wrung my heart. His words died away and he sat still, his head bowed. I could barely see him.

I was afraid, knowing that he was drifting away from me into his sadness, his mortal sickness. I was afraid I would lose even his shadow. I wanted to keep him with me. Though I did not and could not understand it as he did, I knew what the bond between us was, and how to use it to bring him back.

I said, “I want to know about Aeneas. After he left Africa, after he looked back over the water and saw her funeral fire burning… where did he go then?”

The poet kept his dejected posture for a while. He shook his head a little. He said hoarsely, “Sicily.” He looked around, shrugging his shoulders slowly to get the cramp out.

“He’d already been there, hadn’t he?”

“He went back to celebrate the Parentalia for his father. While he was in Africa with Dido, a year had passed since Anchises died.”

“How did he celebrate?”

“Properly. With ceremony and sacrifice, and then with games and competitions and a feast.” His voice had grown stronger. The music was coming back into it. “Aeneas has a very just sense of what’s appropriate. And he knew his men needed heartening. Seven years wandering and here they were back where they’d been a year ago. So he gave them games. What he forgot was the women.”

“That hardly seems surprising.”

“Very well, my cynic. But Aeneas is not a forgetful man. He thinks about all his people. A lot of women had entrusted themselves to him in the escape from Troy. He’d tried to make the long voyaging bearable to them. But when he announced that they were setting off yet again to seek the promised land, it was too much. Juno got into them, she goaded them. They rebelled. They went down to the shore and set fire to the ships.”

“What do you mean, Juno got into them?”

“She hated Aeneas. She was always against him.” He saw that I was puzzled.

I pondered this. A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can’t “get into” me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.

The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names—Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren’t people. They don’t love and hate, they aren’t for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.

I was entirely puzzled. I finally asked, “Why does this Juno person hate Aeneas?”

“Because she hates his mother, Venus.”

“Aeneas’ mother is a star?”

“No; a goddess.”

I said cautiously, “Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus.”