The Penelopiad. Margaret Atwood
sometimes thought I may have been a sacrifice to the god of the sea, who was known to be thirsty for human life. Then the ducks rescued me, through no act of my father’s. I suppose my father could argue that he’d fulfilled his side of the bargain, if bargain it was, and that he hadn’t cheated, and that if the sea-god had failed to drag me down and devour me, that was his own tough luck.
The more I think about this version of events, the more I like it. It makes sense.)
Picture me, then, as a clever but not overly beautiful girl of marriageable age, let’s say fifteen. Suppose I’m looking out the window of my room – which was on the second floor of the palace – down into the courtyard where the contestants are gathering: all those young hopefuls who wish to compete for my hand.
I don’t look directly out of the window, of course. I don’t plant my elbows on the windowsill like some hulking maid and stare shamelessly. No, I peek, from behind my veil and from behind the drapery. It would not do to let all those scantily clad young men see my unveiled face. The palace women have dolled me up as best they can, minstrels have composed songs of praise in my honour – ‘radiant as Aphrodite’, and all the usual claptrap – but I feel shy and miserable. The young men laugh and joke; they seem at ease with one another; they do not glance up.
I know it isn’t me they’re after, not Penelope the Duck. It’s only what comes with me – the royal connection, the pile of glittering junk. No man will ever kill himself for love of me.
And no man ever did. Not that I would have wanted to inspire those kinds of suicides. I was not a man-eater, I was not a Siren, I was not like cousin Helen who loved to make conquests just to show she could. As soon as the man was grovelling, and it never took long, she’d stroll away without a backwards glance, giving that careless laugh of hers, as if she’d just been watching the palace midget standing ridiculously on his head.
I was a kind girl – kinder than Helen, or so I thought. I knew I would have to have something to offer instead of beauty. I was clever, everyone said so – in fact they said it so much that I found it discouraging – but cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he’ll take kindness any day of the week, if there’s nothing more alluring to be had.
The most obvious husband for me would have been a younger son of a king with large estates – one of King Nestor’s boys, perhaps. That would have been a good connection for King Icarius. Through my veil, I studied the young men milling around down below, trying to figure out who each one was and – a thing of no practical consequence, since it wasn’t up to me to choose my husband – which one I preferred.
A couple of the maids were with me – they never left me unattended, I was a risk until I was safely married, because who knew what upstart fortune hunter might try to seduce me or seize me and run away with me? The maids were my sources of information. They were ever-flowing fountains of trivial gossip: they could come and go freely in the palace, they could study the men from all angles, they could listen in on their conversations, they could laugh and joke with them as much as they pleased: no one cared who might worm his way in between their legs.
‘Who’s the barrel-chested one?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that’s only Odysseus,’ said one of the maids. He was not considered – by the maids at least – to be a serious candidate for my hand. His father’s palace was on Ithaca, a goat-strewn rock; his clothes were rustic; he had the manners of a small-town big shot, and had already expressed several complicated ideas the others considered peculiar. He was clever though, they said. In fact he was too clever for his own good. The other young men made jokes about him – ‘Don’t gamble with Odysseus, the friend of Hermes,’ they said. ‘You’ll never win.’ This was like saying he was a cheat and a thief. His grandfather Autolycus was well known for these very qualities, and was reputed never to have won anything fairly in his life.
‘I wonder how fast he can run,’ I said. In some kingdoms the contest for brides was a wrestling match, in others a chariot race, but with us it was just running.
‘Not very fast, on those short legs of his,’ said one maid unkindly. And indeed the legs of Odysseus were quite short in relation to his body. It was all right when he was sitting down, you didn’t notice, but standing up he looked top-heavy.
‘Not fast enough to catch you,’ said another of the maids. ‘You wouldn’t want to wake up in the morning and find yourself in bed with your husband and a herd of Apollo’s cows.’ This was a joke about Hermes, whose first act of thievery on the day he was born involved an audacious cattle raid. ‘Not unless one of them was a bull,’ said another. ‘Or else a goat,’ said a third. ‘A big strong ram! I bet our young duck would like that! She’d be bleating soon enough!’ ‘I wouldn’t mind one of that kind myself,’ said a fourth. ‘Better a ram than the babyfingers you get around here.’ They all began laughing, holding their hands over their mouths and snorting with mirth.
I was mortified. I didn’t understand the coarser kinds of jokes, not yet, so I didn’t know exactly why they were laughing, though I understood that their laughter was at my expense. But I had no way of making them stop.
* * *
At this moment my cousin Helen came sailing up, like the long-necked swan she fancied herself to be. She had a distinctive swaying walk and she was exaggerating it. Although mine was the marriage in question, she wanted all the attention for herself. She was as beautiful as usual, indeed more so: she was intolerably beautiful. She was dressed to perfection: Menelaus, her husband, always made sure of that, and he was rich as stink so he could afford it. She tilted her face towards me, looking at me whimsically as if she were flirting. I suspect she used to flirt with her dog, with her mirror, with her comb, with her bedpost. She needed to keep in practice.
‘I think Odysseus would make a very suitable husband for our little duckie,’ she said. ‘She likes the quiet life, and she’ll certainly have that if he takes her to Ithaca, as he’s boasting of doing. She can help him look after his goats. She and Odysseus are two of a kind. They both have such short legs.’ She said this lightly, but her lightest sayings were often her cruellest. Why is it that really beautiful people think everyone else in the world exists merely for their amusement?
The maids sniggered. I was crushed. I had not thought my legs were quite that short, and I certainly hadn’t thought Helen would notice them. But not much escaped her when it came to assessing the physical graces and defects of others. That was what got her into trouble with Paris, later – he was so much better looking than Menelaus, who was lumpish and red-haired. The best that was claimed of Menelaus, once they started putting him into the poems, was that he had a very loud voice.
The maids all looked at me to see what I would say. But Helen had a way of leaving people speechless, and I was no exception.
‘Never mind, little cousin,’ she said to me, patting me on the arm. ‘They say he’s very clever. And you’re very clever too, they tell me. So you’ll be able to understand what he says. I certainly never could! It was lucky for both of us that he didn’t win me!’
She gave the patronizing smirk of someone who’s had first chance at a less than delicious piece of sausage but has fastidiously rejected it. Indeed, Odysseus had been among the suitors for her hand, and like every other man on earth he’d desperately wanted to win her. Now he was competing for what was at best only second prize.
Helen strolled away, having delivered her sting. The maids began discussing her splendid necklace, her scintillating earrings, her perfect nose, her elegant hairstyle, her luminous eyes, the tastefully woven border of her shining robe. It was as if I wasn’t there. And it was my wedding day.
All of this was a strain on the nerves. I started to cry, as I would do so often in the future, and was taken to lie down on my bed. Thus I missed the race itself. Odysseus won it. He cheated, as I later learned. My father’s brother, Uncle Tyndareus, father of Helen – though, as I’ve told you, some said that Zeus was her real father – helped him to do it. He mixed the wine of the other contestants with a drug that slowed them down, though not