I was aware that someone was smiling at me, and I thought: Now you’re really going out of your mind, you’ve forgotten who people are! Then I realized that the person in question was smiling at someone else, with a face as worn and as lined as a dried fig. I don’t know what drew my attention to the person, whose skin was creased into a shape that could have been a smile expressing disbelief or irony or some other meaning unknown to mere mortals. It’s Suzana’s father’s top adviser! I realized. When he was at a meeting we televised a year before, one of my colleagues had whispered into my ear: That’s Comrade X’s right-hand man.
I studied him with as much concentrated hostility as I could muster. Had he or had he not known in advance of Suzana’s impending change of heart? He must have known, seeing as he was her father’s closest confidant. Maybe it was even worse. . Maybe he was the instigator of her sacrifice! Like Calchas. .
My imagination flew off once again to the ancient seaport of Aulis. The rumbling swell and the ceaseless comings and goings of soldiers dotted all along the shore made the atmosphere of suspended activity almost palpable. Most of them were dreaming of giving up war and going back home to their wives or sweethearts. A rumor that the campaign was about to be canceled gave them hope of just such a turn — but suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, came quite different news. In order to calm the winds, Agamemnon, the commander in chief, was going to sacrifice his own daughter!
Most of them didn’t believe their ears. Supporters of the commander of the fleet didn’t believe it because it saddened them too much. Was such a sacrifice really necessary? Agamemnon’s opponents didn’t believe it — they were reluctant to admit that the chief was capable of such self-denial. And people who were hoping for the straightforward cancellation of the campaign didn’t want to believe it, either.
No, something like that just wasn’t possible. It was utter madness; it was uncalled for. As for the wind, old seadogs confirmed that it wasn’t so bad it required such a tragic step. Anyway, who could be sure it would make the wind abate? After all, it was that soothsayer Calchas who’d come up with the idea — and everyone knew how unreliable he was.
I scanned the crowd to find Suzana’s father’s adviser again, but I’d lost him. If I had managed to locate him, in the crazy mood I was in I might have been capable of approaching him and asking out loud: “So it was you, wasn’t it, who gave Suzana’s father that piece of perverse advice? But why did you do it? Go on, tell me why!”
Robert Graves’s book dealt at length with the issue of Calchas. According to the oldest sources, his personality was as puzzling as could be. It was known that he was a Trojan, sent over by Priam with the specific task of sabotaging the Greeks’ campaign. Eventually, though, he’d gone over to the other side, become a turncoat. So you couldn’t avoid wondering whether he was a genuine renegade, or whether his new allegiance was just a strategic cover. It was equally possible, as often happens in circumstances of this kind, that after facing numerous dilemmas in the course of a war whose end was nowhere in sight, Calchas had ended up a double agent.
His proposal to sacrifice Agamemnon’s daughter couldn’t have been a key step in his career. (Let’s not forget that his prophecies, like those of any turncoat, were treated with skepticism.) If he were still secretly in Priam’s service, then obviously he would ask for the sacrifice of the commander’s daughter, to foment further discord and resentment among the increasingly fractious Greeks. But if he’d genuinely gone over to the Greek side, the question would then arise whether he truly believed that the sacrifice would placate the winds (or whatever else: passions, disagreements), and thus permit the fleet to set out.
Whatever he was, a true or sham renegade, an agent provocateur or a double agent, his advice was just too wild, not to say lunatic. A soothsayer, especially in times such as these, must have had many enemies just waiting to use the tiniest of his blunders against him. So if he had made the suggestion to Agamemnon, he would have been sure to lose out in the end.
Far more plausible, therefore, was that Calchas never said anything of the kind, and that the idea of sacrifice had been invented by Agamemnon, for reasons known only to himself. He must have seen how easy it would be to implicate Calchas after the event, to justify his crime in the eyes of enlightened people and to mask its real motive. It was even quite possible that raging winds and so on hadn’t even been mentioned as the fleet was preparing to depart, and that the sacrifice had been performed without a word of explanation. .
The soldiers and civilians of Aulis had converged at the place where the altar had been set up. Maybe invitations had been issued, to prevent the place being overrun. Everyone in attendance must have been on the verge of asking the obvious question: What is this sacrifice? What’s it for? The very absence of a clear answer would have heightened anxiety and fear tenfold.
No, Calchas hadn’t given any advice at all. A prophecy from him would have seemed too dubious, too Machiavellian. But in that case, why had the idea of sacrifice sprung from Agamemnon’s mind like an illumination?
Groups of spectators drifted like ripples lapping rhythmically on the shore toward the places with the best view of the parade, or toward the central stand where the top leaders would take their seats.
I was drifting imperceptibly myself with the same end in view when I saw Suzana. She was in C-2, a little lower down than I was, together with other sons and daughters of the elite.
She was subtly pale, and her indifference could be guessed partly from her profile, and partly from the glistening comb that held up her luxuriant hair. She was staring vacantly in the direction of the band.
Why are they asking for your sacrifice, Suzana? I questioned her silently, with quiet sorrow. What storm are you supposed to appease?
For a brief moment I felt entirely empty. Gripped by the sense of void and exhausted by so many questions, I wondered: Am I not going too far with all these analogies? Isn’t it altogether simpler — a woman naturally pulling back from an affair when an official engagement is imminent? I was the victim of what was, after all, a quite ordinary change of heart. Was my mind not simply trying to give my defeat a tragic dimension that came only from its own nature?
I’d got hold of the word sacrifice and then used it to contrive an analogy I’d taken further than was warranted. I was no better than a novice poet who manages after much effort to spawn a metaphor, then falls for it entirely and constructs an entire poetic work on a foundation no more solid than sand.
I would never have thought that a sudden perception of a likeness between Suzana and Iphigenia — one of those random, instantaneous illuminations that flash across men’s minds thousands of times every day — could take root in my mind and grow to the dimensions it had now acquired. The identification had become so complete for me that I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash if I’d heard an announcer on radio, on TV, or in the theater introduce “the daughter of Agamemnon, Suzana!” However, the equivalence was also what allowed me to see in an instant a whole new side of the ancient drama, in the light of the present situation of Suzana and her father. It made a new sense of the relations between Agamemnon and the other leaders, of their power struggles and fallback positions, their reasons of state, their use of exemplary punishments, and of terror. .
For a while, my mind seemed intent on casting off a too heavy burden, and made a concentrated effort to de-dramatize the whole thing. But all of a sudden the well-oiled machine in my head jammed, clashed gears, and went into reverse. A massive and fearless NO took hold of my entire being.