12.20.05
Penelope
Yesterday I watched you cattle being slaughtered one by one for a feast that you will not attend. They were led into a shed and their throats slit, the blood running out as their fat was being torn out of their bodies, as entrails fell to the floor and the smell of raw flesh permeates the air. There are eight or so of theses cattle killed every morning. Your fine flock is dwindling in number. So go the preparations for the feast.
I pulled the cloth down closer over my face and turned from the window to look at our bed. The bed you crafted yourself for us, that bed whose dead roots now spread out below me and that tree whose wood surrounds me. Every knot bears your imprint. Every curve of our headboard bears your scent and your name and it torments me at night to sleep in, cold and alone.
Our nurse, she helps. True to you in her old age she takes care of me while the other girls go wantonly with the suitors. I see them rouge their lips at night. I hear their cries of passion in the other rooms and I simply grow ever more wearily of the both of them. In the mornings they can hardly move. They don’t have enough energy to be bothered with me, but your nurse, she bathes me and oils my hair. She keeps me looking well enough that these suitors won’t leave. I could be comforting myself. Twenty years takes a toll on a woman’s looks. It doesn’t take the same toll on her dowry.
The countryside seems to have lost its lustre. The green plains, rich for farming seem to be shrinking and shrivelling into themselves. There will be no more crops one year. One year we will walk outside and it will be eternal winter. I think… I think one day I will walk downstairs and the whole of Ithaca will be in my dining hall. One day the whole of Ithaca will have lost their senses and I will not know what to do.
I don’t know what to do now.
They’ve already found me out once. I mean, I did keep it up for a long time and I cannot tell whether that is a testament to me or to their stupidity, yet for four years I wove and unwove Laertes’ shroud. During the day I would sit with the sun streaming in on my and my hair loose so that they could see me innocently weaving a shroud for my soon late father-in-law. Then at night by candle light I plucked out each thread. Eventually my fingers calloused, they bled, my eyes I think began to fail me a little bit but at least I was safe until one of those girls, those nasty girls, told them my secret. That secret was gone from me then.
I sometimes consider marrying one of them just to be over with it, to open the door and pick the first man I see, not matter how filthy. Could that life be worse than pining away for you Odysseus? Could it be worse than to sit in your house and see it destroyed little by little each day?
I think too of murder, simple as it would be to poison them as they eat and claim it was retribution from the gods. They have no respect for the gods, you know, they should have been killed by now, I would only be acting as an instrument. I couldn’t be blamed if such a thing would happen. No one would think to blame me, of all people, if such a thing would happen.
Other days I consider killing myself. I imagine the noble scene: the chaste wife plunging a short dagger into her perfect white breast. It is far nobler to die like this than in the arms of a man not my husband, she cries before her body slumps over their nuptial bed. Myths would be told about me for ages. Wouldn’t that please you, the story of wily lost Odysseus and his lost brave wife?
I look forward to each night, when I can think nothing and say nothing for a long time, when I don’t have to feel so naked under my dress. I don’t dream of you. I don’t dream of anything and for that I am glad. I only wish that I could sleep more without seeming a bad hostess, ignoring her guests.
Every moment there is this knocking. Every moment someone wants me. Even at this moment.
shi-ou-sama at
