The Penelopiad. Margaret Atwood
but she had a habit of sliding away. I like to think that she may have been responsible for calling up that flock of ducks, but probably she wasn’t: she preferred swimming in the river to the care of small children, and I often slipped her mind. If my father hadn’t had me thrown into the sea she might have dropped me in herself, in a fit of absent-mindedness or irritation. She had a short attention span and rapidly changing emotions.
You can see by what I’ve told you that I was a child who learned early the virtues—if such they are—of self-sufficiency. I knew that I would have to look out for myself in the world. I could hardly count on family support.
iv
The Chorus Line: Kiddie Mourn, A Lament by the Maids
We too were children. We too were born to the wrong parents. Poor parents, slave parents, peasant parents, and serf parents; parents who sold us, parents from whom we were stolen. These parents were not gods, they were not demi-gods, they were not nymphs or Naiads. We were set to work in the palace, as children; we drudged from dawn to dusk, as children. If we wept, no one dried our tears. If we slept, we were kicked awake. We were told we were motherless. We were told we were fatherless. We were told we were lazy. We were told we were dirty. We were dirty. Dirt was our concern, dirt was our business, dirt was our specialty, dirt was our fault. We were the dirty girls. If our owners or the sons of our owners or a visiting nobleman or the sons of a visiting nobleman wanted to sleep with us, we could not refuse. It did us no good to weep, it did us no good to say we were in pain. All this happened to us when we were children. If we were pretty children our lives were worse. We ground the flour for lavish wedding feasts, then we ate the leftovers; we would never have a wedding feast of our own, no rich gifts would be exchanged for us; our bodies had little value. But we wanted to sing and dance too, we wanted to be happy too. As we grew older we became polished and evasive, we mastered the secret sneer. We swayed our hips, we lurked, we winked, we signalled with our eyebrows, even when we were children; we met boys behind the pigpens, noble boys and ignoble boys alike. We rolled around in the straw, in the mud, in the dung, on the beds of soft fleece we were making up for our masters. We drank the wine left in the wine cups. We spat onto the serving platters. Between the bright hall and the dark scullery we crammed filched meat into our mouths. We laughed together in our attics, in our nights. We snatched what we could.
v
Asphodel
It’s dark here, as many have remarked. ‘Dark Death’, they used to say. ‘The gloomy halls of Hades’, and so forth. Well, yes, it is dark, but there are advantages—for instance, if you see someone you’d rather not speak to you can always pretend you haven’t recognised them.
There are of course the fields of asphodel. You can walk around in them if you want. It’s brighter there, and a certain amount of vapid dancing goes on, though the region sounds better than it is—the fields of asphodel has a poetic lilt to it. But just consider. Asphodel, asphodel, asphodel—pretty enough white flowers, but a person gets tired of them after a while. It would have been better to supply some variety—an assortment of colours, a few winding paths and vistas and stone benches and fountains. I would have preferred the odd hyacinth, at least, and would a sprinkling of crocuses have been too much to expect? Though we never get spring here, or any other seasons. You do have to wonder who designed the place.
Have I mentioned the fact that there’s nothing to eat except asphodel?
But I shouldn’t complain.
The darker grottoes are more interesting—the conversation there is better, if you can find a minor rascal of some sort—a pickpocket, a stockbroker, a small-time pimp. Like a lot of goody-goody girls, I was always secretly attracted to men of that kind.
I don’t frequent the really deep levels much, though. That’s where the punishments are dealt out to the truly villainous, those who were not sufficiently punished while alive. It’s hard to put up with the screams. The torture is mental torture, however, since we don’t have bodies any more. What the gods really like is to conjure up banquets—big platters of meat, heaps of bread, bunches of grapes—and then snatch them away. Making people roll heavy stones up steep hills is another of their favourite jests. I sometimes have a yen to go down there: it might help me to remember what it was like to have real hunger, what it was like to have real fatigue.
Every once in a while the fogs part and we get a glimpse of the world of the living. It’s like rubbing the glass on a dirty window, making a space to look through. Sometimes the barrier dissolves and we can go on an outing. Then we get very excited, and there is a great deal of squeaking.
These outings can take place in many ways. Once upon a time, anyone who wished to consult us would slit the throat of a sheep or cow or pig and let the blood flow into a trench in the ground. We’d smell it and make a beeline for the site, like flies to a carcass. There we’d be, chirping and fluttering, thousands of us, like the contents of a giant wastepaper basket caught in a tornado, while some self-styled hero held us off with drawn sword until the one he wanted to consult appeared. A few vague prophecies would be forthcoming: we learned to keep them vague. Why tell everything? You needed to keep them coming back for more, with other sheep, cows, pigs, and so forth.
Once the right number of words had been handed over to the hero we’d all be allowed to drink from the trench, and I can’t say much in praise of the table manners on such occasions. There was a lot of pushing and shoving, a lot of slurping and spilling; there were a lot of crimson chins. However, it was glorious to feel the blood coursing in our non-existent veins again, if only for an instant.
We could sometimes appear as dreams, though that wasn’t as satisfactory. Then there were those who got stuck on the wrong side of the river because they hadn’t been given proper burials. They wandered around in a very unhappy state, neither here nor there, and they could cause a lot of trouble.
Then after hundreds, possibly thousands of years—it’s hard to keep track of time here, because we don’t have any of it as such—customs changed. No living people went to the underworld much any more, and our own abode was upstaged by a much more spectacular establishment down the road—fiery pits, wailing and gnashing of teeth, gnawing worms, demons with pitchforks—a great many special effects.
But we were still called up occasionally by magicians and conjurors—men who’d made pacts with the infernal powers—and then by smaller fry, the table-tilters, the mediums, the channellers, people of that ilk. It was demeaning, all of it—to have to materialise in a chalk circle or a velvet-upholstered parlour just because someone wanted to gape at you—but it did allow us to keep up with what was going on among the still-alive. I was very interested in the invention of the light bulb, for instance, and in the matter-into-energy theories of the twentieth century. More recently, some of us have been able to infiltrate the new ethereal-wave system that now encircles the globe, and to travel around that way, looking out at the world through the flat, illuminated surfaces that serve as domestic shrines. Perhaps that’s how the gods were able to come and go as quickly as they did back then—they must have had something like that at their disposal.
I never got summoned much by the magicians. I was famous, yes—ask anyone—but for some reason they didn’t want to see me, whereas my cousin Helen was much in demand. It didn’t seem fair—I wasn’t known for doing anything notorious, especially of a sexual nature, and she was nothing if not infamous. Of course she was very beautiful. It was claimed she’d come out of an egg, being the daughter of Zeus who’d raped her mother in the form of a swan. She was quite stuck-up about it, was Helen. I wonder how many of us really believed that swan-rape concoction? There were a lot of stories of that kind going around then—the gods couldn’t seem to keep their hands or paws or beaks off mortal women, they were always raping someone or other.
Anyway, the magicians insisted on seeing Helen, and she was willing to oblige. It was like a return to the old days to have a lot of men gawping at her. She liked to appear in one of her Trojan outfits, over-decorated to my taste, but chacun à son goût. She had a kind of slow twirl she would do; then she’d lower her head and glance up into the face of whoever had conjured her up, and give one of her trademark intimate