Memoirs of a Bitch (8 page)

It was a day of solemn ceremony and empty halls. Menelaus was performing the sacrifices he had agreed to reinstate after months of complaints from the council, and the whole court was with him in the temple. I was alone with my slave girls when I felt a gush of warm water flood my thighs. I nearly cried for help, but changed my mind. No, I didn't want them burning oils and holding
my hands. No, Helen of Sparta would give birth alone on the stairs like a stray cat, gripping the balusters so as not to cry out. Helen, stupid and obstinate, would be alone, only her own tranquil ghost with her in the only battle she would be allowed as a woman to fight on her own, with that body born to be bought and sold. Be alone, Helen, but don't cry out, break your nails on the stone stairs; breathe, Helen, but don't think about the one who should be here but is far away beyond the sea. Only you yourself matter now, you and your own strength, Helen made of stone and fire. Rip yourself apart like new linen to release this kicking and breathing weight, this weight that is your own on these empty stairs.

The tension in my legs gave way with a great contraction to one final push, and the only cry that escaped my otherwise sealed lips and mingled with the shrill cries of the mortal creature just born, screaming like a calf to open its lungs. Beginning to die from the moment when, eyes closed against the light, it opened its nostrils to breathe for the first time. A small screaming creature at the top of the stairs. Like a wild bitch I bit through the cord that joined us and dragged myself toward her with my hands. For it was her; a female on the stairs, between legs draped with placenta the cleft of her sex that would one day make her, like her mother before her, merchandise for barter. But not now; today I could
touch her with my hands and she was mine. My baby girl on those stairs, eyelids still obstinately shut, on her head a thin tuft of hair stained with blood and fluid. I pressed my baby against my painfully swollen breasts, among the stained folds of my dress. I murmured to soothe her. Sleep, baby girl, sleep with me. I rocked us backward and forward together. Ignoring a thin rivulet of blood running from my ankles on to the floor. A trivial sign of my victory in this war without witnesses. Sleep, baby girl, sleep. She did not sleep, but stopped screaming and opened her eyes. Blind eyes barely capable of distinguishing vague shadows in the dazzling light. But no matter. It was my shadow those glaucous orbs were seeing. And I already knew what color they would be when they cleared. Halfway between green and blue. Unbearable.

What Achilles had not foreseen was the boredom. A boredom that consumes without burning, without hurting, enclosing us in cages without bars or walls, eating away at the substance of our days and taking over so that we cannot be aware of it before it is too late. This is what happened to me. They took Hermione away to be suckled by a wet nurse, leaving me alone with my swollen breasts in empty rooms that smelled of sadness.

Menelaus kept his distance, disappointed at his failure to produce an heir. He no longer came to my rooms, and began solacing himself at night with beautiful young slave girls with bodies as yet unstretched by childbearing. His old kindness gave way to a general indifference toward his lawful wife, and I no longer felt any pressure to conceal my hatred for him. His absence from my
life was just an inconvenient emptiness, an easy excuse for annoyance. I ate and slept alone, and only my women slaves came near me. There was no point in doing my hair or caring how I dressed, and I very soon degenerated again into the tired slattern Achilles had found.

I tried to work off my rage in long runs over the arid fields and exhausting swims in the cold waters of the Eurotas, though it didn't help. I had one slave girl who knew how to ride a horse, and in her company I was able to while away whole afternoons of otherwise unbearable tedium.

Menelaus knew nothing of these expeditions, nor would he have cared, since I was now nothing more than the woman he still visited regularly twice a month with the sole purpose of conceiving a son. And so I would go riding, bribing the grooms with gold and jewelry, and calling at poverty-stricken hovels in the foothills of the Peloponnese, where I mingled with shepherds and peasants and women worn down by constant childbearing and hard work. They would offer me water and ask for nothing back. The gods they prayed to had no relation to the gods venerated in the temples. If I had been born like them, I would have died after an anonymous life of exhausting labor and been buried close to the door of my home. They had never expected anything else. It was the only destiny open to them. They had read it in their
mothers' wrinkles and sucked it in with their milk, accepting their destiny just as they accepted their own blood. But for me it had been otherwise. I had had the chance to live a different life, but it had been snatched out of my hands. Of course I was only flesh, bones and skin just like them, but I was also full of regret for what had so nearly happened for me. No, the only way I could have found peace would have been to burn myself out, reconciling myself to the death in life of so many other women like myself, wives of courtiers or captains, invisible women who at thirty years of age were already weaving their own shrouds behind closed doors. But that was not for me. So I forced myself to run till I was breathless, to swim furiously till I was at the point of collapse, and to try to forget in sleep the emptiness of my life. Weaving and burning the earth under my feet.

Hermione got bigger and came to think of her wet nurse as her mother. It was too late for me to do much about this, and in any case I had never wanted to have children. My body, if a little softer than before, regained its slender perfection. But Menelaus's love for me never returned. He continued to pay me visits, more and more often drunk, his breath smelling of wine and his clothes saturated with the cheap perfumes of other women. I had never loved him, but we had respected one another, and now he was insulting me. When he rolled over on
his back snoring with satisfaction, I felt myself little more than a tavern tart, the sort who cost little and are quickly worn out. And no one seemed to remember any longer that I was the queen. All Menelaus wanted was a male heir, and when he had that, even these visits would end. My two rooms, my garden and the desolate countryside beyond the river were my world. Though I still had my ghost walking at my side and lingering silently in dark corners. A presence too real for me ever to feel really alone. Of course I had more than many women had. But never enough to satisfy my fiery spirit.

Menelaus was on top of me, an indistinct bristly shape, grunting like an exhausted wild boar until, with a final spasm, he soiled my thighs. Then as always he went on lying on the bed while I pulled the sheet around myself and turned to the wall. Waiting for him to go away. It had been a bad day, rain surprising me while I was swimming, violent whirlpools grabbing me so that I strained my muscles struggling to reach the bank.

I had been resting my aching legs on the soft mattress when Menelaus came reeling up to the bed. I had heard the familiar slamming of the door against the wall. There was little I could do but shut my eyes and make room for him; the quicker I gave in to him the sooner he would be finished; he was always in a hurry.

When he'd finished having his pleasure, he grunted to clear his voice and began his usual grumble: “Still no boy children.”

“No, not yet.” My voice was expressionless.

“Maybe there's something wrong with you, woman. You produced a daughter easily enough.”

“There's nothing wrong with me.”

“With me, you mean? Is that what you're saying? That I can't—”

“Possibly. How can we know? The gods decide these things.”

My voice was flat, colorless. His drunken rages were usually harmless. That was why I had my back to him, so I didn't see him raise his arm and hit me across the neck. Then he pushed me to the floor. I fell painfully, tangled in the sheet. He was on me before I could get up. I had nothing to defend myself with, nowhere to hide. All I could do was submit to his blows until he had finished. Then he went away without looking back, leaving a battered bundle by the wall. Something the slave girls could tidy away.

A split lip, swollen eyes and purple bruises on my cheeks. With delicate hands Etra stitched my right eyebrow and cut the thread. No broken ribs, she said. She had bound my left wrist to a splint; promising it would heal quickly. I very tentatively swept back my hair and looked in the mirror. The woman I saw was someone else. My scornful smile hurt my lips and produced a dark laugh on the unrecognizable mask in the mirror. Poor Helen. Poor Helen indeed. The pathetic timidity of an unloved husband had suddenly turned to violence.

Someone knocked hesitantly on the door. Etra, embroidering at the window, met my look. She too knew the timid knock of the man who in another life had been Menelaus. I nodded to her to open the door, carefully
tidying a few loose hairs away behind my ears before turning. “Well?”

He drew back, terrified. Now he could see for himself the marks of his violence on my body, he was repelled. A weak man. He sat down, or rather collapsed on to the bed. Giving way completely. Holding his head in his hands, feebly tossing back his lifeless hair.

“Forgive me, Helen.”

So he was taking forgiveness for granted. Admitting he'd been drunk would not have helped. He would have done it again. He was asking me to excuse him, he wanted my forgiveness. I had no feeling for him in his misery. He had used up all my pity. I took a deep breath, then spoke in measured tones, without raising my voice; my wounded mouth still hurting. “Hit me again if you like, Menelaus. But no, I cannot forgive you.”

Slowly he raised his head to meet my eyes and my composed, expressionless face. I'm made of stone. His eyes filled with tears that he made no effort to hold back. I realized what he was about to do a moment before he did it.

“Don't kneel down before me, Menelaus. It won't help.”

He ran away like a child, like the coward and fool he was. He ran away. Etra came back from the next room and took up her embroidery, which she had left on her stool. As she passed, she imperceptibly touched my arm.
Less than a caress, but more than a consolation. She understood. I turned to the mirror again, and recognized in its depths the eyes of a devastated but extremely beautiful woman. On her wounded features she had painted a cruel smile.

I dreamed of my soldier that night. As usual, I couldn't see his face, but I could feel him in the way one feels the sun, as a physical sensation on the skin. He held me close as he had never done in life, softly murmuring my name. That was all he said. But when I woke the marks of the blows I had suffered seemed to have disappeared. Menelaus would never touch me again.

Hermione was tired. I knew it from the impatient way she pulled at my dress, hanging with her whole weight from its folds, out of sight of the members of the council before us. I pinched her arm hard to force her to keep still. She had to get used to these long, exhausting ceremonies, and the sooner the better. Suddenly she was still, with scarcely a quiver. I hoped for her sake that she was not about to start crying. In any case, the tenth anniversary of the coronation of Menelaus required a solemn liturgy: embassies had come from many kingdoms in Greece and even from Asia Minor. The most important absentee was Agamemnon, who had stayed in Mycenae to keep an eye on his wife's latest pregnancy. My arrogant sister had still not managed to bring a son into the world. The joke in the suburbs of Mycenae was
that the King of Kings couldn't father boys. I smiled at the thought. Just what they deserved. I remembered the smug way my sister had flaunted her belly the last time I'd seen her, years before! Another girl, to add to the three they already had. A disgrace to the throne of Mycenae. The rapidly dwindling queue of diplomats told me we were near the end. The last ambassadors filed into the throne room between the guard and the council; a dazzle of black skin suggesting that the king of Egypt had sent his usual gift of Nubian slaves. I was sorry; in the cold of Sparta they soon died. It was nearly summer now, but the two chained men were already shivering. Distracted by the black slaves, for a moment my tired eyes missed the slow column in the middle of the hall—last of all came warriors carrying helms decorated with horsehair plumes under their arms. Trojans. Long horse-hair crests that nearly reached to the ground. Taller than Greeks, more massively built. The counselors pretended indifference, but it was easy to see their envy. It had been a long time since good blood last flowed between Troy and Greece.

“King of Sparta, we bring congratulations from Priam, King of Troy and Sovereign Lord of Asia Minor, who has petitioned the gods to make the next ten years of your reign as prosperous as the first ten.”

I started at the barbarian accent of the Trojan envoy,
a gray-haired elderly man, though still handsome in his bronze armor. Menelaus on his throne inclined his head with the hieratic gravity the counselors had gradually managed to teach him after eight disastrous years. He sat quite still, full of regal dignity if you didn't know him, but by now he had no secrets from me: I recognized the hungry gleam in his eye as he looked about for gifts. A man of small account.

As if aware of this, the Trojan envoy went on: “King Priam sends you two Trojan chargers, born wild and tamed by Prince Hector himself. They await you in your stables.”

A nod, but I knew Menelaus was disappointed; he had been hoping for gold. As with Agamemnon, age was making him greedy. He was already thirty-five years old, and the shadow of debauchery under his eyes would never leave him. Old and greedy. And that would be my future with him: watching him sit there unworthily on the throne of my ancestors.

“Helen…” It was Hermione, one murmur among many that had run through the hall at the arrival of the Trojans. By now, after so many years the wound in my heart had healed, and was nothing more than a dull pinprick, not even a pain under my ribs. “Helen,” never “Mother.” Despite myself, I was getting like Leda: “Quiet, Hermione, it's nearly over.”