Margaret Atwood: The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus

As he was listening to this account, Odysseus went white, though he remained silent. That night, however, he revealed to me the cause of his distress.

‘We’ve all sworn an oath,’ he said. ‘We swore it on the parts of a cut-up sacred horse, so it’s a powerful one. Every man who swore it will now be called on to defend the rights of Menelaus, and sail off to Troy, and wage war to get Helen back.’ He said it wouldn’t be easy: Troy was a great power, a much harder nut to crack than Athens had been when Helen’s brothers had devastated it for the same reason.

I repressed a desire to say that Helen should have been kept in a locked truck in a dark cellar because she was poison on legs. Instead I said, ‘Will you have to go?’ I was devastated at the thought of having to stay in Ithaca without Odysseus. What joy would there be for me, alone in the palace? By alone you will understand that I mean without friends or allies. There would be no midnight pleasures to counterbalance the bossiness of Eurycleia and the freezing silences of my mother-in-law.

‘I swore the oath,’ said Odysseus. ‘In fact, the oath was my idea. It would be difficult for me to get out of it now.’

Nevertheless he did try. When Agamemnon and

Menelaus turned up, as they were bound to do along with a fateful third man, Palamedes, who was no fool, not like the others—Odysseus was ready for them. He’d spread the story around that he’d gone mad, and to back it up he’d put on a ridiculous peasant’s hat and was ploughing with an ox and a donkey and sowing the furrows with salt. I

thought I was being very clever when I offered to accompany the three visitors to the field to witness this pitiful sight. ‘You’ll see,’ I said, weeping. ‘He no longer recognises me, or even our little son!’ I

carried the baby along with me to make the point.

It was Palamedes who found Odysseus out he grabbed Telemachus from my arms and put him down right in front of the team. Odysseus either had to turn aside or run over his own son.

So then he had to go.

The other three flattered him by saying an oracle had decreed that Troy could not fall without his help. That eased his preparations for departure, naturally. Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?

What can I tell you about the next ten years? Odysseus sailed away to Troy. I stayed in Ithaca. The sun rose, travelled across the sky, set. Only sometimes did I

think of it as the flaming chariot of Helios. The moon did the same, changing from phase to phase. Only sometimes did I think of it as the silver boat of

Artemis. Spring, summer, fall, and winter followed one another in their appointed rounds. Quite often the wind blew. Telemachus grew from year to year, eating a lot of meat, indulged by all.

We had news of how the war with Troy was going: sometimes well, sometimes badly. Minstrels sang songs about the notable heroes Achilles, Ajax, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Hector, Aeneas, and the rest. I didn’t care about them: I waited only for news of Odysseus. When would he come back and relieve my boredom? He too appeared in the songs, and I relished those moments. There he was making an inspiring speech, there he was uniting the quarrelling factions, there he was inventing an astonishing falsehood, there he was delivering sage advice, there he was disguising himself as a runaway slave and sneaking into Troy and speaking with Helen herself, who—the song proclaimed had bathed him and anointed him with her very own hands.

I wasn’t so fond of that part.

Finally, there he was, concocting the stratagem of the wooden horse filled with soldiers. And then the news flashed from beacon to beacon Troy had fallen. There were reports of a great slaughtering and looting in the city. The streets ran red with blood, the sky above the palace turned to fire; innocent boy children were thrown off a cliff, and the

Trojan women were parcelled out as plunder, King

Priam’s daughters among them. And then, finally, the hoped-for news arrived: the Greek ships had set sail for home.

And then, nothing.

Day after day I would climb up to the top floor of the palace and look out over the harbour. Day after day there was no sign. Sometimes there were ships, but never the ship I longed to see.

Rumours came, carried by other ships. Odysseus and his men had got drunk at their first port of call and the men had mutinied, said some; no, said others, they’d eaten a magic plant that had caused them to lose their memories, and Odysseus had saved them by having them tied up and carried onto the ships. Odysseus had been in a fight with a giant one-eyed Cyclops, said some; no, it was only a one-eyed tavern keeper, said another, and the fight was over non-payment of the bill. Some of the men had been eaten by cannibals, said some; no, it was just a brawl of the usual kind, said others, with ear-bitings and nosebleeds and stabbings and eviscerations. Odysseus was the guest of a goddess on an enchanted isle, said some; she’d turned his men into pigs—not a hard job in my view—but had turned them back into men because she’d fallen in love with him and was feeding him unheard-of delicacies prepared by her own immortal hands, and the two of them made love deliriously every night; no, said others, it was just an expensive whorehouse, and he was sponging off the Madam.

Needless to say, the minstrels took up these themes and embroidered them considerably. They always sang the noblest versions in my presence the ones in which Odysseus was clever, brave, and resourceful, and battling supernatural monsters, and beloved of goddesses. The only reason he hadn’t come back home was that a god the sea-god Poseidon, according to some was against him, because a Cyclops crippled by Odysseus was his son.

Or several gods were against him. Or the Fates. Or something. For surely the minstrels implied, by way of praising me only a strong divine power could keep my husband from rushing back as quickly as possible into my loving and lovely wifely arms.

The more thickly they laid it on, the more costly were the gifts they expected from me. I always complied. Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.

My mother-in-law died, wrinkled up like drying mud and sickened by an excess of waiting, convinced that Odysseus would never return. In her mind this was my fault, not Helen’s: if only I hadn’t carried the baby to the ploughing ground! Old

Eurycleia got even older. So did my father-in-law,

Laertes. He lost interest in palace life, and went off to the countryside to rummage around on one of his farms, where he could be spotted shambling here and there in grubby clothing and muttering about pear trees. I suspected he was going soft in the head.

Now I was running the vast estates of Odysseus all by myself. In no way had I been prepared for such a task, during my early life at Sparta. I was a princess, after all, and work was what other people did. My mother, although she’d been a queen, had not set a good example. She didn’t care for the kinds of meals favoured in the grand palace, since big chunks of meat were the main feature; she preferred at the very most a small fish or two, with seaweed garnish. She had a manner of eating the fish raw, heads first, an activity I would watch with chilled fascination. Have I forgotten to tell you she had rather small pointed teeth?

She disliked ordering the slaves about and punishing them, though she might suddenly kill one who was annoying her—she failed to understand that they had value as property and she had no use at all for weaving and spinning. ‘Too many knots. A spider’s work. Leave it to Arachne,’ she’d say. As for the chore of supervising the food supplies and the wine cellar and what she called ‘the mortal people’s golden toys’ that were kept in the vast storehouses of the palace, she merely laughed at the thought. ‘Naiads can’t count past three,’ she would say. ‘Fish come in shoals, not lists. One fish, two fish, three fish, another fish, another fish, another fish! That’s how we count them!’ She’d laugh her rippling laugh. ‘We immortals aren’t misers we don’t hoard! Such things are pointless.’ Then she’d slip off to take a dip in the palace fountain, or she’d vanish for days to tell jokes with the dolphins and play tricks on clams.