Memoirs of a Bitch (6 page)

With a sigh he had turned away to lie on his back. I pulled the sheet tightly around myself, wanting to weep. But I couldn't, and that hurt me even more. The dry air stung my eyes. Menelaus was soon asleep and snoring, grunting through his short nose, arms invading my side
of the bed. Through the wall I could hear Clytemnestra moaning, like the bitch they claimed I was.

Stiff with dried blood and sperm, the sheet scratched my skin. Disgusted, I went to wash myself. Soon a maid came to take the dirty sheet because Agamemnon wanted to inspect it. A couple of confident knocks on my door. I called out come in, combing my hair with furious wrenching strokes. It was Clytemnestra, no less. Already made up at that early hour, with precious stones in her flame-colored hair.

“Had a good night?”

She was smiling. I pursed my lips, forcing the comb painfully through my hair, and didn't answer. She sat down on the edge of the bed, carefully balancing her big round belly and stroking it with insufferable smugness.

“I'll pretend I heard a yes.”

I felt poisonous. “Suit yourself, sister.”

She favored me with an easy, icy smile. “They're leaving this morning, you know. You'll have to come say goodbye.”

Tyndareus and Leda. I dropped the comb and hesitated before putting on the pearl necklace, though I knew Menelaus would expect me to wear it. I stood up. Clytemnestra's thin mouth twisted in a grimace of disgust. “You should look after yourself better.”

“You mean like you? I'm still more beautiful than you are, don't forget.”

She grabbed my wrist. Even with her swollen belly, she was stronger than I was.

“Be very careful, Helen.”

But I wasn't a child, not any longer. Her hatred couldn't reach me anymore. I smiled and shook her off. “
Little mums
first,” I said, ceremoniously ushering her to the door. She walked out with dignity, her eyes reduced to slits. I took a last look in the mirror. I did not know the woman I saw. That was what they had achieved. Two deep creases were appearing at the corners of my mouth.

Carriages and horses. A king. Agamemnon standing before the main door with his arms crossed, a sumptuous cloak of Phoenician linen around his shoulders. Menelaus at his side with a white royal fillet around his head. Fillets: I remembered Diomedes in the sun in the middle of that courtyard, and now this tiny man. My husband gave me a timid smile, and I smiled back. He wasn't to blame. So long as I could believe that, I could smile for him. Tyndareus was already waiting in a two-seater coach, with his driver holding the horses.

What is the right way to take leave of your father? Should you run down the steps and hug him? Not us. Not me with Tyndareus. I looked down on his wrinkled face from the top step and said goodbye from there. He nodded. That was all.

“It'll take us two days to the sea, Menelaus, then I'll send the horses back. We have a ship waiting to take us to Cephalonia.” The kingdom of their exile: rocks, cliffs and goats. My cousin Penelope and her husband Ulysses lived next door just across the water.

Leda came silently out of the palace behind me. She embraced Clytemnestra, then turned to me. “Queen of Sparta, I salute you.”

“I'm still Helen, Mother.” A lie, and I knew it.

Leda gently stroked my cheek. “You have my jewels, daughter. Make the most of them. And sometimes think of me.”

Behind her back, Clytemnestra's already sour expression froze. All I could do was bow my head and accept my mother's words.

Agamemnon and Menelaus bowed too; Leda acknowledged them both with a regal inclination of the head. Then she dropped her bright veil over her face, walked down the steps without a backward glance, and vanished behind the linen curtains of her waiting litter. Tyndareus looked at us one more time. His eyes fixed on the palace of Sparta, his palace, as if he knew Leda must be feeling the same behind the drawn curtains of her litter. He had lived an entire life there. I saw his lips moving, but could not read them. He did not speak, just made a brusque gesture. His driver climbed up and shook the reins. Sharp
cries echoed around the courtyard as the cortège moved off. Four slaves lifted my mother's litter and fell in behind the rest. As they did so, a breath of wind moved the linen curtains to reveal for a moment a simply dressed woman, with no jewelry, a sight never seen before even when she was in mourning. It must have been my imagination, I told myself, but I thought I saw tears on her cheeks. Then the curtain fell back and the procession disappeared through the gate. Even Tyndareus had turned away to fix his eyes on the mountains of the Peloponnese. The royal guard drawn up on the road hit their shields with their lances in salute. A war cry ran from house to house through Sparta. Nothing more. Only empty streets under the midday sun.

Agamemnon and Clytemnestra stayed the next day and the day after that. Used to taking orders from his older brother, Menelaus was silent and thoughtful, letting the King and Queen of Mycenae give a banquet each evening at the expense of the Spartan treasury. Parties and singing, my sister wearing new jewelry every day, shouts and cries in the night. My own marriage consisted of nothing in the opaque night but the brief panting of Menelaus, who seemed to be quickly tired even by making love. When I dressed I made little effort for him apart from wearing his necklace, and felt happy when my plain unpainted face revealed to my mirror that I was exhausted from lack of sleep.

It irritated me to see my sister dancing, carelessly swinging her stomach and laughing all the time. I could
not laugh. Music no longer had any power over me, and my lips were automatically stretched in fixed smiles that deceived no one but Menelaus. Agamemnon bared his teeth and raised a full cup of wine to toast my life, ruined by his actions. The red lips behind his curly black beard were like the leer of a demon from the underworld.

It was only when the queen's belly had grown so heavy that she could hardly walk, that one gray morning Agamemnon gave the order for departure.

“The boy must be born in Mycenae,” he announced, harnessing his carriage. He saw himself as a simple man, did Agamemnon, using no coachman and doing the driving himself.

Clytemnestra, her rapidly swelling figure glittering with gold, was barely capable of leaning forward to say goodbye to me. “We'll meet again soon, little sister,” she said, displaying her canines with her eyes shining. It took two female slaves to lift her into her litter. Then with a languid gesture she informed her husband that she was ready to start.

“Right you are, my queen,” cried Agamemnon in his deep, kingly voice. A sharp jerk on the reins, and they were off. Standing on the steps, I watched trotting horses raising the dust yet again.

The courtyard was empty. Now the new king of Sparta
could smile, free at last of the shadow of his tiresome brother. But the sky was full of clouds and his queen's face as cold as stone.

I forgot my kingdom, the Sparta of my ancestors beyond the palace walls. It no longer existed as far as I was concerned. But Menelaus was happy; he liked going down into the streets and enjoyed the approval of his people. Little Menelaus, ridiculously small among tall warriors chosen for their fine figures. Yet they learned to respect him, and even became devoted to him. They admired his fairness, his sense of justice. The fact that he was a warrior. All they had known of me was my madness. They had never been my people. They learned to ignore the sad queen who never ventured beyond her garden. I passed my days under the olive trees of my childhood, leaving my spindles and looms on the ground. I had a retinue of slaves who never spoke in loud voices, barely even whispered, and the wind from the Eurotas swept their whispers away. The sound of the river, where I never swam anymore, became the backdrop of my boredom. A dull, colorless existence, over before it had even begun. They had stolen my life, leaving no one for me to fight. Helen was dead, twice dead, and it was too late for her to be born again. No prince would climb over the walls. No gods inhabited the altars any longer. And no sun
from the sky could penetrate my clouds. I crushed leaves beneath my feet as I walked in blood-red sunsets and danced with my ghosts among the trees. My longing for my soldier came back to dwell in my heart, and I often thought I could see him in the dim light at the end of corridors. I was navigating gently on a slow sea, borne up not by desperation, but by the still death of every hope I had ever nurtured. The swing had been removed from the garden. It was as if Diomedes had never existed.

It was during this uncertain time that Achilles came again.

The slow monotonous succession of unvarying days had engulfed me; boredom thickening my blood and sapping color from my life. My hair had become loose and dull and I no longer bothered to comb it. But Menelaus noticed nothing. I didn't even have the strength to begin hating him as I had expected to. My husband was just the man who sat on the throne of Sparta administering justice, trained in the stadium with his special guard, and came to my room at night for a few brief moments of rough and tedious pleasure. I ignored him, he was just part of that gray sequence of repeated events into which I had fallen unawares and couldn't be bothered to fight against. In any case, there was nothing left worth fighting against. As those who had shaped my life
saw it, all that remained for me now was to bring into the world an heir for the son of Atreus, and when I had achieved that, my life would have no other function. But from the mountains, out of the rising sun, came galloping the men of Phthia.

He came looking for me in the garden just as he had once before, such a long time ago. In that dull world he put Menelaus in the shade and shone like gold. Achilles. I put down my shuttle.

The voice of my husband spoke from behind him. “What a pleasant surprise, prince. You must be our guest for as long as possible. I know you have met the queen before …”

I lifted my eyes to meet his. The same unbearable color.

“Allow me to show you around Sparta,” Menelaus went on. “I think I've got used to my kingdom by now, even if there's never enough time; it's rather a special city, of course …”

“I'm sure Sparta needs your attention, and I should hate to get in the way of your duties. If the queen is agreeable, I'll just stay in the palace.” The voice of Achilles was calm and peaceful. I never experienced his legendary wrath. But it was a strong voice, not that of a general or a king, but expecting obedience. Menelaus stepped
back as if he had been punched. Achilles continued to watch him, as if indifferent to my own response. I kept still, looking at my shuttle lying on the grass.

“If our guest would like to stay,” I said, “we would be discourteous to deny him.” My voice was flat and my heart beating very softly. I had no idea if it was still able to beat any faster. In the silence that followed I was conscious of the birds singing in the garden.

Menelaus cleared his throat. “Whatever you like. I'll be back before evening.”

I ignored him as he walked quickly away across the grass. Far off, beyond the gate, the guards beat their lances in salute.

Without looking up I gave a command in a low voice: “You may leave.” A swish of dresses was enough to tell me that my slave girls had obeyed me, leaving their looms abandoned on the grass like mute traces of a catastrophe that never happened. Achilles sat down beside me, his honey-colored hands pushing the shuttle out of the way. I looked up. Green flames, Diomedes had once said, flames from the gods of the underworld. The flames that now came from the eyes of Achilles were hard and compact, in color somewhere between blue and gray. Like a wall. As if they were searching for an answer to I knew not what question.

“You seem exhausted.”

“I know.”

“But you're still the loveliest woman in the world.”

“No one cares about that anymore. Certainly I don't.”

“But I do.” He took my hand. I looked at my fingers, thin and pale against his rough palm. Weather-beaten by the sun and wind of his distant island. I did not close my fingers.

“I'm about to go away. My father wants me to go to Scyros, to his friend Lycomedes. To finish my education, he says. But the fact is he's ashamed of me. He thinks I'm mad.” He closed his eyes, as if waiting. As if giving me a chance to agree or disagree. Either to say nothing, or to say yes, King Peleus was right.

“That's what they say about me too.”

He smiled. “That's why I am the one who should have married you, Helen of Sparta. Just say the word and I'll take you away even now.”

I looked down. “Menelaus doesn't deserve that.”

He laughed. “No, it's
you
who don't want it, Helen. You'd rather fade away lamenting for what they've taken from you.”

I felt my eyes grow hard. “Is it wrong for me to mourn for my life?”

“Don't let them destroy you.” His eyes were stronger than mine, and he lifted my chin to force me to look at him. “You're too beautiful to fade away.”

I pushed his hand away. “I'm just property, nothing but merchandise for your pleasure. If only I could just be an ordinary woman …”

“I'd have come looking for you even if I'd known you were dressed in rags. Even if you were a hundred years old. Your spirit is what I need, Helen, and I can see that a spark of it still exists. Your beauty would be meaningless to me without that spark. That's why I'm here today. For that brilliant gleam I've known in no other woman.”

I looked up. “I'm made of stone.”

He smiled. “Which is how I know you'll never let that fire go out.”

I let his words enter me, gradually dispersing my fatigue. A spirit of fire. To my surprise he picked up the shuttle and rewound the thread.

“Come on, queen, get on with your work, and while you're working you can talk to me. Tell me what happened after I left.”

I took the shuttle from him and leaned it against the loom: “I went to bed early, Achilles. There's not much to say.”