Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

We went down the Via Regia and people joined us all along the way, all shouting out the wedding word nobody knows the meaning of, “ talassio! talassio!” and throwing nuts about and making dirty jokes. The dirty jokes are part of the marriage ritual, which seemed to surprise the Trojans. There was plenty of time to tell them, since the whole lot of us walked all the way to Lavinium, at least six miles. The wedding torches had to be relit or replaced several times, and people got hungry and began eating their walnuts and filberts instead of throwing them about. Water sellers with their tiny, heavy-laden donkeys did a good business all the way.

It was strange to me to walk inside the flame veil, looking out at the world through it. All that path I knew so well, all the hills and fields and forests, were a little dim, and colored faintly as if with sunset light. I felt set apart from all things, all people, alone, in a way I would never be alone again.

When we came at last to the front door of the house on the hill in the new city, Caesus turned round and with a whoop waved his burning torch and threw it end over end as high as he could into the crowd massed behind us. There was a scramble for it and a lot of yelling, as people burned their hands grabbing at it to carry off for good luck.

Then they all quieted down again and watched me as I rubbed the posts of the doorway with the lump of wolf’s fat Vestina had carried and given to me to use—it was brownish, stale, with a rank smell. Then she gave me some red wool fillets, and I tied them around the door posts, murmuring worship to Janus the Doorkeeper.

All this time tall Aeneas stood in the shadow inside the doorway, silent and unmoving, watching me.

When I was done, I stood still and looked up at him.

He asked the question that is asked: “Who are you?”

And I gave the answer that is given: “Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia.”

Then with a sudden, wide smile he moved, he picked me up and swung me high over the threshold of our house and set me down inside it.

So I was made his wife, the mother of our people, his and mine.

As a wife, I never felt that grieving anger that I used to feel and once spoke out to my poet in Albunea, asking why must a girl be brought up at home to live as a woman in exile. Indeed my exile was a small matter, since I went only a few miles from my old home, my father, the dear Regia with its laurel tree, and the Lar Familiaris of my childhood. But there was more to it than that. Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free. But in giving up my girl self and taking on the obligations of womanhood I found myself freer than I had ever been. If I owed duty to my husband, it was very easy to pay. And as understanding grew between us and we came to trust each other, there were no restraints on me at all but those of religion and my duty to my people. I had grown up with those, they were part of me, not external, not enslaving; rather, in enlarging the scope of my soul and mind, they liberated me from the narrowness of the single self.

I did not bring the Penates of Laurentum with me. My father had manumitted his slave, Maruna’s mother, to be their servant and guardian in my place. When I first entered my new house in Aeneas’ arms, the Penates of his father’s house in Troy stood on the altar at the back of the atrium: they were the gods of this house now, my family’s gods, and I was their servant and guardian. A very old bowl of thin silver, worn and dented, stood near them, ready for the sacred meal. The lamps were of polished black clay. On our dining table was a plate painted red and black and on it was a little mound of dried fava beans, the food that must always stand on the table for the gods who share it with us, and near it the salt cellar: all as it should be. And on the hearth Vesta, the holy fire, burned small and clear.

Aeneas was about twice my age when we married. When I first saw his whole body, all muscle and sinew and bone and scar, I thought of the lean splendor of a wolf Almo and his brothers had caught and kept caged for a while before they killed it as a sacrifice to Mars. Aeneas’ body had been made in a hard school. But the man was no wolf, nor a hard man. I knew he had loved two women before me and grieved for them both. Although he knew me first only as an item in a treaty, he was disposed by nature and by practice to treat me as a wife, intimate to his own being. At first I think my youth awed him. He was afraid of hurting me. He praised my beauty with incredulous delight. He honored my ignorance, but I was impatient with it and ready to learn from him, as he soon learned. As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.

I will not, I cannot tell much in detail of the three years of our marriage, for my mind holds me back from speaking much of those doings and undertakings that seemed of such importance to us and filled our days so full. And indeed they were important both to us and to our people; and they have filled my life, not only then but ever since, completing me, so that though I knew the bitter grief of widowhood, I seldom felt the utter emptiness. I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining. The purest, completest happiness I know is that of a baby at the breast and the mother giving suck. From that I know what perfect fulfillment is. But I cannot regain it by remembering, by speaking, by yearning. To have known it is enough, and all.

I knew how little time Aeneas had to live, and he did not. Or I think he did not. I do not know all the prophecies he may have heard during his voyage, or when he went among the shadows. If he did know, the knowledge did not weigh on him or make him shorten his view or shrink his hope at all. He looked forward fearlessly and sought to shape the time to come; he was a man building a city, founding a nation, working in every way he could for the well-being of his people, his family, himself. His shield hung in our entrance hall, full of images of the time to come, the kings, the templed hills, the heroes and their wars. He had carried the future of his people on his shoulder into war. Now he meant to found that future in peace.

After ten years of war in Troy, war had met him again unlooked for, unwanted, here on the Italian shore. He wanted never to meet it again. He was determined to make an enduring peace, as Latinus had done. His first and strongest purpose was to establish the rule of law, the custom of negotiation and arbitration, the superiority of rational patience over mindless violence, among his Trojans and the Latins who were building Lavinium with them, and among all our neighboring peoples.

It did not take me long to realise, as the first year passed, how his mind dwelt on the ending of the brief war here in Italy, how that had shaken and reshaped all his idea of who he was and what his duty was. Not the war itself; that had been unavoidable; once Mars rules men, Mars must be obeyed on his own terms. It was the ending of it that weighed on Aeneas: the manner of Turnus’ death. To him, that put all the rest into question.