Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. “So do we,” he said. “But Venus also became more… With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite… There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light…”

It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy. I said at last, “Why would anyone hate her?”

“Jealousy,” he said.

“A sacred power jealous of another?” I could not understand it. Is a river jealous of another river, is earth jealous of the sky?

“A man in my poem asks, ‘Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?’”

He looked at me. I said nothing.

“Great Homer of Greece says the god lights the fire. Young Lavinia of Italy says the fire is the god. This is Italian ground, Latin ground. You and Lucretius have it right. Offer praise, ask for blessing, and pay no attention to the foreign myths. They’re only literature… So, never mind about Juno. The Trojan women were furious at not having been consulted, and determined to stay in Sicily. And so they set fire to the ships.”

That I could understand well enough. I listened.

“The whole fleet would have burned if a rain squall hadn’t come up and drowned the fires. They lost four ships. The women ran, of course, took to the hills… But Aeneas never even thought of punishing them. He realised he’d pushed them too far. He called a council and let them all choose freely: stay in Sicily, or sail with Aeneas. Old people and many women, a lot of mothers with young children, chose to stay. Others chose to keep on looking for the promised land. So, after the nine days of the festival were done, and another day for the tears of parting, they sailed.”

“This way? To Latium?”

The poet nodded. “But first he put in at Cumae.”

I knew there is an entrance to the underworld there. “To go down? Why?”

“A vision: his father Anchises told him to come find him, across the dark river. And having always obeyed his father and the fates, Aeneas went to Cumae, and found the guide, and the way down.”

“And he saw the marsh where the babies lie crying,” I said. “And his friend who was murdered so cruelly that even his ghost was not healed. And Queen Dido, who turned away and wouldn’t speak. But he didn’t look for his wife Creusa.”

“No,” the poet said humbly.

“It doesn’t matter. I think there is no rejoining, there,” I said. “Shadow cannot touch shadow. I think the long night is for sleeping.”

“Daughter of Latinus, foremother of Lucretius! You promise me what I most desire.”

“Sleep?”

“Sleep.”

“But your poem—”

“Well, my poem will look after itself, no doubt, if I let it.”

We both sat in silence. It was quite dark. The wind was down. Nothing stirred.

“Has he left Cumae, by now?”

“I think so,” the poet said.

We spoke very low, almost in whispers.

“He’ll stop at Circeii, to bury his nurse Caieta, who begged to come with him; but she’s old and ill, and she dies in the ship. He puts ashore to bury her. That will delay him some days.”

A chill of fear had come into me. Too much was coming to me, too soon. I wanted the poet to tell me what was coming, and I didn’t want it. I said, “I don’t know when I can come back here.”

“Nor do I, Lavinia.”

He looked across the dark air at me and I could tell that he was smiling.

“Oh my dear,” he said, still very softly. “My unfinished, my incomplete, my unfulfilled. Child I never had. Come back once more.”

“I will.”

I am not the feminine voice you may have expected. Resentment is not what drives me to write my story. Anger, in part, perhaps. But not an easy anger. I long for justice, but I do not know what justice is. It is hard to be betrayed. It is harder to know you made betrayal inevitable.

Who was my true love, then, the hero or the poet? I don’t mean which of them loved me more; neither of them loved me long. Just sufficiently. Enough. My question is which of them did I more truly love? And I cannot answer it. One was my husband, the beautiful man whose flesh my flesh enclosed to make my son in me, the author of my womanhood, my pride, my glory; the other was a shadow, a whisper in shadows, a virgin’s dream or vision, yet the author of all my being. How can I choose? I lost them both so soon. I knew them only a little better than they knew me. And I remember, always, that I am contingent.

So, of course, were they. It is only too likely that little Publius Vergilius Maro might have died at six or seven, ashes under a small gravestone in Mantua, before he was ever a poet; and with him would have died the hero’s glory, leaving a mere name among a thousand names of warriors, not even a myth on the Italian shore. We are all contingent. Resentment is foolish and ungenerous, and even anger is inadequate. I am a fleck of light on the surface of the sea, a glint of light from the evening star. I live in awe. If I never lived at all, yet I am a silent wing on the wind, a bodiless voice in the forest of Albunea. I speak, but all I can say is: Go, go on.

When i got home with maruna the next day, everybody on the women’s side tried to tell me simultaneously that Turnus had sent a messenger to my father, and that Queen Amata wanted to see me right away.

My habit of fear of my mother made me wince inwardly at that. Yet she had not screamed at me or humiliated me in the old way for a long time now. I was ashamed of my cowardice. As soon as I had washed the dirt of travel from my feet and changed my clothes, I went to her rooms. She sent her maids away and greeted me with real eagerness, kissing my forehead and taking my hands to draw me down to sit beside her. Such a show of love might have seemed false, affected, but Amata was not a schemer. She was far too much at the mercy of her feelings to play a part she did not feel. She was truly glad to see me, and her pleasure went to my heart. I had so longed for the approval, the kindness of my beautiful and unhappy mother that the least sign of it was irresistible to me. I sat down by her willingly.

She stroked my hair. Her hand trembled a little; she was very excited. Her great, dark eyes seemed full of light.

“King Turnus has sent a messenger, Lavinia.”

“So all the women said.”

“It is a formal request for your hand in marriage.”

She was watching me so eagerly and so closely, sitting so near, that I could do nothing but look down, speechless. I felt the blush rise to my skin, the wave of heat all over my body, and the sense of being trapped, helpless, exposed.

My shrinking silence did not surprise or displease her. She took my hand and held it while she talked. “It is an unusual proposal. King Turnus is a great-hearted man. He speaks not only for himself, but for other young kings and warriors who have come here courting you—Messapus, Aventinus, Ufens, and Clausus the Sabine. Turnus’ message is that to avoid dispute and bad blood among these powerful subjects and allies of Latium, the time has come for the king to choose your husband from among them, and so end their rivalry. All are agreed to accept Latinus’ choice. He will be sending for you soon to tell you his decision.”