Memoirs of a Bitch (3 page)

“Soldier,” I murmured, hoping not to frighten him. He grabbed his spear, as I expected, but recognized me in the dim torchlight.

“Princess! You …”

“Shh! I couldn't stay shut up any longer! I …”

He watched me from under his helm. Waiting for orders, perhaps. My courage failed. My heart was beating so loudly in my chest that he must have been able to hear it. But outwardly I was just a capricious child, defying the fever and my father's orders to stay in my room. Yet I could not bring myself to command him to open the door for me and not tell anyone of my disobedience. I took a step forward. “I'm scared,” I admitted and it was true, in that corridor full of great long shadows and silence steeped in other people's panic from behind barred doors. He took off his helm and placed it on the floor beside his spear. Then he knelt down so he could look me in the eyes. He was so much taller than me.

“Princess …”

Without thinking, I knelt down too and before my nerve could fail me, took his face in my hands. What did the first humans to create an organized society do? How could they ever have believed they would be able to control their own blood? I examined his face in the
flickering torchlight, stroking his hollowed cheeks and fair hair. And looking into those dark green eyes that I would nevermore forget.

“Princess …” he said again, very quietly.

“Not princess,” I said as softly as I could, “Helen …” One day I would hate my own name. But on this night it carried within it everything that was me.

“Helen …” he almost whispered, his hands at my back to help me to my feet. “Helen …” Without looking at me, he lifted the bar and opened the door. And without looking at him, I crossed the threshold into my room. For a moment his big hand met mine again in the muffled darkness beyond the door. When I turned he was no more than a black silhouette against the red torchlight. Only his eyes were still shining when he disappeared beyond the barrier.

The epidemic lasted another fifteen days. On the sixteenth, Etra came to set me free and held me in a long embrace. “My child, my child,” she murmured.

“Are many dead?” I asked, pushing her away.

She shook her head. “Your brothers …”

“Are many dead?” I repeated more loudly.

She stroked my face. “Don't think about it. All cremated and buried already.” I brushed her hand away. She struggled to her feet with a sigh. “You loved your brothers so
much, it's understandable. Their funeral is today. Naturally, because of their rank, they had to come last.” As she talked she picked up a comb, to get me ready.

But I was no longer listening. I was staring in the bronze mirror at a face I did not recognize.

They cremated my brothers together on a single pyre that afternoon. Everyone still left of the Spartan court was there. Both my parents had survived the sickness. My mother, in mourning, had not cut her hair, and hid her lack of tears behind a thick purple veil. The entire corps of the royal guard rattled their spears and shields in salute to the princes as they disappeared in the smoke. Ignored and swaddled like a black dog in my mourning clothes, I looked through the ranks for him. He wasn't there. When the pyre had burned down and my father asked Etra where I was, she didn't know. She found me much later, wrapped in my cloak in the lowest fork of an olive tree. It took her a long time to persuade me to hand over the scissors I had clenched in my hand. And it took her longer still to collect the long locks of hair I had cut off close to my scalp, and which the wind had entangled with the olive twigs. It was four days before I ate again. All I remember of that period is a void in which no sound reached me. I never knew the soldier's name, and never would know it.

In the time that followed I lived in a void, in a state of deprivation. A void that those eyes now lost and burned had cut into my own. I was myself arid and burned. Nothing but dull ashes under the skin. But when others looked at me all they saw was a silly child.

The heirs to the throne were dead and Tyndareus was growing old. I took care always to dress, obstinately, in black. Keeping my hair short so it would never grow long again. Fasting to hollow my face and sharpen my cheekbones, rejecting a beauty I could not see, but which refused to disappear in the eyes of others. I was just Helen, nothing more. Nails grown into talons, skin stretched over the bones protruding from my pelvis. Secretly I hoped I would look in the mirror one day and see nothing at all. Leda wasn't interested. I too had
learned to close my eyes to the coming and going of officers to her room. It meant nothing to me. I sank daily deeper into a darkness and emptiness that tasted like glue. Down, down, down. To the bottom. I burned my musical instruments. And my light-colored clothes. There was no beginning or ending to my mourning. Etra watched the burning, and no longer knew what to say. My father wore mourning for two winters; we saw one another from afar in empty corridors; two winters during which I never spoke and never asked anyone for anything. I had become the terror of the palace. Silly maids whispered that I never slept. That I was wandering about the palace looking for the spirits of my dead brothers. They understood nothing. I went back to my rooms where in winter I extinguished the braziers. I plunged into dreams in which he appeared as a distant silhouette against a bright light. Offering me his hand as he did that day in the courtyard; I would go forward to him with arms outstretched but I could never see his face. Sometimes I dreamed of the stuff of his cloak the time he brought me home; the smell and taste of the rough fiber sharp and clear to my nose and tongue. I could see the blond down on his hands and could feel him smiling above me. But I could never capture his green eyes. Those were my worst dreams. I would wake with an unsatisfied need for more sleep. Like a drug. It was then that I began
burning laurel leaves. The oracles were said to use them when making prophecies. They were said to open a door to new worlds. I breathed in the thick suffocating smoke, my eyes wide open to the night. But the laurel smoke brought Theseus into my room. There was no longer any guard outside my door. When the smoke at last overcame me, I would collapse in a sleep as dreamless as death. One day Etra found me prostrate beside the brazier. She shook me again and again and called me, but I would not open my eyes. Her voice reached me from far away, as if I were under water. The laurel stood between us, between me and the world. She dragged me into the garden and poured cold water on my head. I woke blinking in a dazzling light, mumbling disconnected words without knowing where I was. Etra beside me was just an indistinct shape.

“Poison. Poison! Never again, child, never again.” Strong arms lifted me. Too slender to have been his. It could have been a promise. Or a threat. Never again, Etra. Never again.

“You must stop cutting your hair. You must start eating again. You could be so beautiful. They'll have to pay a huge sum of gold for you.” Tyndareus was speaking in the neutral tones of a merchant advertising goods in the market. He was sitting by my bed but not looking at me.
There was a sad gray light from the window and the sound of the Eurotas softly singing.

“At first you'll suffer and crave the laurel, but that will pass. You can be sure I won't let them give you poppy milk, so there won't be any point in asking for it. You'll have to pull through on your own.” He hesitated, as if thinking.

I rested my head on the pillow and looked at him. His eyes shifted away from mine: “I shall be gone, Helen. Soon I shall be gone. Sparta will need a king. And you will need a husband.”

I didn't answer. I had been out of reach of his demands for a long time already.

“They were my sons too,” he said, talking to himself, his voice breaking into a thousand tiny pieces. But he would not weep, I knew that. Like me, he was made of stone. He looked at me, his eyes searching mine, but they found nothing. I would have liked to shout at him that my eyes were sealed, and that for me everything had been dark since the day of the pyre. But there would have been no point. It would have been useless. He would not have understood. The memory would have to rot down and die inside me, because inside that memory I was strong. No one could reach me. Even if they forced me to marry, I would not resist. I was already safe.

*

It took many months for me to learn to live without the laurel and the visions it had brought me. They uprooted all the hedges in the garden. I developed deep hollows under my eyes, and was afflicted for many days by trembling as if I had been raped. I shouted for a brazier and my leaves. My gateway to a world of nightmares even stronger than my own. Tyndareus ignored me and Leda kept away until I was better. After a month of force-feeding (Etra and two powerful maids crushed my food to pap to stop me from choking and prevent me from vomiting it back up), I recovered an appearance of sanity, at least so the slave women said. They cut my nails, and my hair started growing again like a thick thatch of flax.

Then Leda came to my rooms wrapped in purple, her neck heavy with gold chains set with pearls, her fair hair beginning to be streaked with gray. She sat down by me as if she had only left me that morning, smiled for a long time and raised a hand to stroke my face. I didn't resist but kept quite still.

The rumor went that she had aborted a courtier's child. I studied her stomach which still looked flat under the folds of her dress. Leda, Leda, what have you done to us?

“I've brought you a few things. To make you beautiful again.” She smiled the smile of an accomplice. At a wave of her hand, slave girls brought in caskets and chests
full of jewels and precious cloth. Half the treasure of Sparta. A kingdom where most people wore the one tunic all the year round. My eyes lingered a long time on the glittering gold and precious stones and the fine cloth. Leda watched with satisfaction, as if those treasures my soldier would never have been able to see or touch could ever dispel my pain. It was then I realized it could not help me to stay shut up there. That the pain which was my strength could never protect me from such things. That my salvation existed only in my own sick dreams. I looked at Leda.

“When I'm married will you two go into exile?”

I reached for the nearest casket. Gold and pearls.

Leda had stopped smiling.

The summer was half over when Diomedes came. Tyndareus had sent heralds far and wide to announce that he was offering his daughter in marriage, and with her the kingdom of Sparta. But for many months no suitor presented himself and the sumptuous guestrooms stayed empty. “No one wants our kingdom,” said Leda angrily. She had realized what exile was going to mean for her. A rock in the middle of the Ionian sea. Stones and goats, and no more officers of the guard.

I'm of no interest to anyone, I told myself, smiling at my increasingly healthy reflection in the mirror. I had a familiar ghost walking beside me and needed nothing more. Tyndareus, waiting impatiently for my unknown future husband, stared at me in silence, gloomy reproof in his eyes. I returned his gaze and
shrugged my shoulders. The madwoman, they called me in all the courts of Greece, the madwoman. My never-ending mourning had created a scandal. Whispers connected my name with the most atrocious word of all: incest.
She wears mourning for her brothers as one would for lovers
…

The thaw came, and after the third winter since the pyre, colors began to bloom again among the stones of Sparta. Emerald-tinted insects danced, and gold flickered in the mild air. But still no messenger, no suitor at the city gates. I began to think this was how we would live forever, in that palace that was full of folk but always seemed empty. With that sad king, his extinguished flame leaving just ashes. We were enclosed in mourning: Tyndareus, Leda and I.

I learned much later that it was now that Agamemnon sent his first messengers. He made his offer sound like a threat.
My brother Menelaus is looking for a wife and a kingdom. If no suitor comes, Sparta will be mine.

Tyndareus controlled his temper. He said nothing to me, just forced himself to wait. Then, one evening in high summer, a troop of horsemen crossed the border into Sparta.

The garden was my refuge at night. The slaves who should have been my attendants and companions were afraid
of the dark. When the shadows lengthened they would rush with shrill screams into the house, back to their spindles and looms and their pointless gossip. To their clothes and copper finery. But I would stay out of doors, in the fading violet-tinged light. Slipping barefoot along pathways cut in the dry grass. Rocking myself slowly on swings hanging from the low olive branches. By now all my black clothes had been burned.

That evening the setting sun made the blue of my tunic a dirty gray. With my back to the palace, I sat down on the splintery seat of my favorite swing. I could imagine, beyond the gnarled tree trunks before me, the mud and stone banks of the Eurotas. The cries of soldiers changing guard reached me on the light wind. Apart from this and the almost inaudible sound of running water, the world was silent. Gripping the thick ropes of the swing, I looked out at the emptiness. Letting the light of that unforgotten moonlit night flow into me once more. That evening the light had been like dense rivulets of water running down his lovely body, now petrified forever by death. My eyes had stolen that beauty, snatching it from the rule of time and sickness.
I shall keep him to myself
. The illusion of an eternity more durable than fire or stone. He could have lived forever in that light. Confused, I asked myself whether in the emptiness beyond death, spirits could still remember. And if
they did remember, could they come back to walk invisible on the earth. I closed my eyes. The wind flecked the leaves like an answer. The springy branches of the olive tree stroked my shoulders. Like his rough palm between my shoulder blades. That touch banished for all time by a cruel Fate. I opened my eyes. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains, only an indistinct crown of fire still lay on the horizon. The stars were searching out their ancient eternal pattern in the sky. The hand of my ghost was still caressing my shoulders in a way not even renewed contact with reality could dispel. But when I turned, I saw a man who was not a ghost studying me without smiling, sitting on the grass.