A cousin of Helen, Penelope was given as a bride to the swift, sturdy suitor who had raced faster than all the others, Odysseus. Her father, Icarius, wasn’t happy with the marriage. He followed the couple and stopped them when they were already some distance from Sparta. But Penelope stood her ground. She was a stubborn duck.
Years later, when Odysseus was still fighting beneath the walls of Troy, somebody arrived claiming he was dead. Penelope in desperation threw herself into the sea, but a flock of ducks followed her beneath the water and pulled her up, gripping her sodden clothes in their beaks.
Pan, the wildest and most bestial of the gods, Pan the masturbator, the terrorizer, chose as his mother the woman who for centuries people would point to as an example of chastity and faithfulness: Penelope. There are two versions of the story of Pan’s birth. Some claimed that when Odysseus got back to Ithaca he found “his house infested from top to bottom by lecherous thieves of women.” In the middle of them was Penelope, “the Bassarid, the whorish fox, who majestically keeps her brothel and empties all the rooms of their riches, pouring away the wretched man’s wealth in her banquets.” The wretched man was her husband, Odysseus. So the hero threw her out. She’d have to go back to the father she had once been happy to leave, clinging to her spouse. Thus it was that Penelope saw the Spartan plain again and the mountains that encircled it. On the highlands of Mantinea she made love with Hermes. And, after giving birth to Pan, she died. Pan has run about playing his pipes on the crags of Arcadia ever since.
Others said that, when Odysseus got back to Ithaca, Penelope had already let all one hundred and eight suitors have their way with her. And they were the fathers of Pan. Odysseus’s footsteps echoed in the desolate corridors of the palace, as the suitors lay drenched in blood and Penelope slept on. He opened the door to a room he didn’t remember being there. It was completely empty. In the darkness a child with a sly look on his face was watching him. Two delicate horns sprouted from his curls, and his feet were like a goat’s. Two shiny hooves poked out from the hare’s pelt the baby Pan was wrapped in. Odysseus immediately closed the door. Without saying a word, he went down to the harbor and once again set sail from Ithaca. He didn’t know where to, and this time he was alone.
The suitors’ bodies made a carpet of flesh, blood, gore, and dust. Outside the palace hall, in the courtyard, the twelve unfaithful serving maids swung in the wind, hanged. Everything else was still, save for the jaws of the dogs fighting over Melanthius’s testicles and penis.
Penelope slept on. Her sleep this morning was the sweetest she’d had in twenty years. She sank into irresponsible pleasure, let a weight force itself down on her eyelids, while from behind the door and through the thick walls came the thud of falling bodies and the high-pitched twang of the bow. When Eurycleia woke her, saying that Odysseus had come back and killed the suitors, Penelope was scornful of the old woman’s excitement and dishevelment. For Penelope immediacy was an evil. All her life had been a shrewd avoidance of immediacy. And just as her husband, Odysseus, used to lower his eyes so he could think, his face hidden from all around him, so Penelope, on coming down the big stairway, would lift her tunic up over her cheeks so as to give nothing away in her expression. But now she must go down there again, to greet — they said — the newly returned Odysseus.
The hall was empty and smelled of sulfur. The men had been using sulfur and fire to try to hide the stench of slaughtered flesh. Penelope and Odysseus found themselves sitting down face to face in the glow of the fire. Once again Odysseus lowered his eyes. Penelope’s gaze ran over him feature by feature. In that moment of mute tension they were at once close and hostile as never before. They were two “hearts of iron,” two beings walled up behind the defenses of the mind, occasionally using the weapons of strength and beauty but then immediately withdrawing to their invisible fortresses. Long used to the solitary life, they were reluctant to recognize someone with whom to share their own monologues. Penelope is described as períphrōn, echéphrōn; Odysseus as polýmētis—all words that suggest the supremacy of mind: as artificer of a shrewd control, in Penelope’s case, of constant and complex invention in Odysseus’s. More than the complicity of the flesh, they shared the complicity of intelligence. But intelligence is isolated and distrustful; thus, before recognizing each other, they clashed.
Their son Telemachus couldn’t understand this. He was angry with his mother for being so cold. Penelope answered that she would only feel able to recognize Odysseus if he gave her one of the “signs that only they knew about.” Upon which, a small smile crossed Odysseus’s face. Yes, Penelope too wanted to “put him to the test.” That, in the end, was the one constant in his life. Even Athena, the goddess who protected him, had allowed the suitors to insult him so that “sorrow might bite even deeper into the heart of Odysseus, son of Laertes.” And right to the end, when the battle with the suitors had already begun and in the form of a swallow the goddess was perched on a beam to watch the massacre, even then she had chosen to “put his strength and courage to the test.” One after another, favors and desertions formed an unending series of ups and downs in his life, the only link between the two being Odysseus’s capacity to endure both good fortune and bad. Every good and bad fortune is a test: the sovereignty of the mind lies in recognizing them, in dealing with them as such, in getting through them with the secretly indifferent curiosity of the traveler.
Odysseus rose from his seat and began to give out orders. It was as though the clock had been turned back twenty years. Still Penelope said nothing. Odysseus had his servants wash him and rub him with oil. Athena appeared to him again, “pouring down grace on his head and chest.” And now Penelope recognized him. But, before letting her knees go weak, she wanted to wring at least one of their secret signs out of him. With an authoritative tone to her voice, she ordered Eurycleia to move Odysseus’s bed. And just this once Odysseus rose to the bait. No one could move his bed, he said, unless they chopped it in two first. He had made it with his own hands from a huge olive trunk. The bedroom had been built around the trunk.
It was the sign Penelope was waiting for. And now she let her knees give and, embracing Odysseus, wept. Odysseus wept too, for a long time. When he started talking again, he said nothing of the house and the woman he had come back to. He spoke of tests again, of one last test that loomed in the future. “Woman, we haven’t reached the end of our trials; a great, hazardous, and extraordinary task still awaits me, and I will have to see it through.” Odysseus’s first words to Penelope after she recognized him thus looked forward to a new test and a new desertion. But tests were also their secret language. What separated them in life brought them together in the mind. Penelope was already prepared to look to the future again. She asked for details about this trial. Odysseus spoke of new wanderings, of having to travel from city to city until he reached, alone as ever, the people “who know nothing of the sea.” Penelope merely said in her sober way: “If the gods plan to grant you a better old age, then you may hope that there will be a way out of your troubles.” Eurynome came forward with a torch and led them off to their bed with its mighty roots.
XII
