Guess who?

Guess who I am if you dare? 

I am famous, famous for how efficiently I managed to bar the entrance to a coveted historical place. I am, in other words, The Bouncer of Greek mythology. 

No, I am not Cerberus… Cerberus, bless his brawny shoulders, wasn’t really a bouncer… Cerberus stood by Hades’ side, he growled and looked scary, and helped his master herd unruly souls into hell. Cerberus was a glorified sheep dog who unlike me never had any brains… just muscle. He obeyed orders efficiently and swiftly, but he never thought any strategy through. He never needed to. I wish I could tell you more about Cerberus, I know how popular he is in books and films nowadays, but I really can’t… His three heads contained a total of nine brain cells maximum, so any conversation I ever had with him was extremely limited. He never had much to say for himself poor thing. 

I have a voice. Listening to it may cause you to die an untimely death. 

No silly, I am not a Siren… Sirens did act as guardians, for rivers and straights, you are quite right. Sirens were ruthless killers, right again, the tale of how they lured countless men to their death was immortalised by Homer. However, unlike mine, their modus operandi was rather basic… flirt with the guys until they take their eyes off course and crash their ship into rocks. It was efficient, I’ll give you that. Few ships managed to sail through the strait they guarded in Massa Lubrense, but it wasn’t very interesting as far as strategy goes. (Dear reader, please forgive me, this is sour grapes. You see, I would have loved to be a Siren myself when I was young but I just didn’t have the looks. I am not a team player anyway, so it probably was a blessing in disguise.)

I am a woman though, so you are getting warmer. I am a woman, and I am a dangerous. Don’t look me in the eye or start a conversation with me, it could be fatal. 

Medusa? No, no… I am not Medusa, of course not. I rather liked Medusa actually… she was fun and fierce and ruthless and, just like me, she was a lone wolf. We’d meet up occasionally to go out for a few pints of ambrosia and we’d have a whale of a time. We’d stay out until the early hours of the morning, and she’d finish the night in my bed because she’d missed the last ferry home. I really enjoyed that, because despite all the nasty stuff they say, Medusa was hot… big time. She had this steaming body and (as you all know) killer eyes. Her hair was a mess, I’ll give you that, she was a little scruffy sometimes, but she (as you all know) never liked mirrors. I liked her hyperactivity, her quick mind, her rage… She was in a different class from those bimbos from Capri (whoops, there I go, bitching about those sirens again). What Perseus did to her was quite horrible. I still get very upset when I think of it, even nowadays.

Have you guessed yet? Even if it is just through a process of elimination? You ought to. 

Come on! Try! A bouncer, a woman, who’s not beautiful but smart… A woman who it can be dangerous to talk to.

Ok… most of you have got it, I think. 

Those of you who know, will understand how fitting it was for me to start my story with a riddle. I love riddles, and it is my ability to present impossible, unsolvable problems to others that got me a place in his-tory or rather my-thology. 

Those of you who don’t get it…If we were having conversation in person, I would already have pounced on you with my lioness haunches, or swooped down onto you with my bird wings and eviscerated you with my beak or fangs or whatever they have decided I have instead of teeth and gobbled you up. Because I never did suffer fools gladly... That is where the second part of my legend comes from.

I wasn’t born a monster. I was a perfectly normal baby and little girl. My hips were rather wide and my nose was a little large and pointed, that much is true… But, honestly, Sophocles’ turning me into a lion-haunched and bird-winged animal human hybrid… well that was just petty and nasty.  

My issue, like Medusa (and unlike the blondies), was that I had brains. This was at a time when women weren’t allowed to have any. In ancient Greece, women weren’t educated, they weren’t meant to read books or to know things. They were meant to be pretty and graceful and modest and docile and good at dancing in order to find a husband and once they had a husband, they were meant to have as many kids as possible and to run their homes efficiently. Sois belle et fais des gosses-et tais-toi, ça va de soi. 

Just a quick note in passing: I ought to be nicer about the Sirens, they were after all just girls who were upset at their lot, rightly so, and in reaction, they ganged up and killed as many men as they possibly could using the very weapons the patriarchy had bestowed them: their looks and their singing and dancing talents. Thinking it through, I see how terribly clever this is. Moreover, there is safety in numbers… Of course… in hindsight, it is even smarter... But I digress… 

I became a monster because I learned to read at age six. I used to borrow my elder brother’s parchments from school and I thanks to them, I managed to piece together the written language. Then, I started to read in secret. Even at a very young age, I knew that what I was doing was forbidden, especially for a woman of my social class. 

Life is so unfair. If I had been a boy, I would have been allowed to go to school, to listen to the greatest teachers of the time, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle..., allowed to take notes on a wax tablet, to discuss and debate the finer points in philosophy or science or literature and poetry. Instead, I had hide to be able read my brother’s books and peruse his notes that were full of spelling mistakes because I knew that what I was doing wasn’t allowed.

But I was found out…but it is only because of my big mouth, not because anyone caught me red handed. Reading, when you do it properly, expands your brain and widens your imagination. It makes you wonder; it makes you ask questions and when you have questions, you want to find the answers. I couldn’t find the answers to all my questions in the few books my brother brought back from school (he wasn’t the kind of student that took extra reading home, quite the opposite actually), so I started asking questions to others: my mother, the maids (they didn’t know), my faither, guests to the house... I got the answers to some of my questions but the answers led to more questions, which I would ask as well. And so on, and so forth. The desire for knowledge is an addiction, a virtuously vicious circle. And it is dangerous. One day, I asked too many questions, questions that were too complicated. 

And I was found out. 

And I was shunned.

And I was thrown out on to the street as the unnatural being I was. 

And so I became a monster. 

I became a terrifying chimera, a monster with the body of a woman and the brains of a man. 

I would walk up to men on the street, ask questions, present them with conundrums, make them think and wrack their brains and tease them when they were unable to find the answer to questions that seemed so basic to me. I did quiz them and question them and tire them out intellectually and I suppose I ruffled their pride, but I never killed or devoured a single one of them. I did however emasculate them a little, which is, as we all know a fate worse than death. 

However, let this be said clearly: it is my hunger for knowledge that made me monstruous, not my hunger for human flesh. 

Anyway, that is why I was later thrown off the streets of Thebes and had to guard its entrance. Or rather, I wasn’t really in charge of guarding the entrance to the city but I would stand at the road leading to the city and ask passing travellers to answer my questions. They were questions, not riddles and most definitely not that stupid four-, two- and three-legged riddle. At that point, due to my exile, I had no access to books and I still had so many questions! Some of these travellers were put off by me and decided to turn back because if all the women from Thebes were like that… well the city would be no fun. My terrible revenge on my hometown was to prevent wealthy merchants from doing business and spending their money there. 

Wow. How scary… 

Hell hath no fury and so forth.

Then came Oedipus. I knew what was going to happen with Oedipus from the very start. He had the same arrogance as his father Laius, the King, and the same bovinely stupid gaze as his mother, the Queen. He was the same build as his father, and I remembered seeing the pendant he was wearing hanging around Jocasta’s neck when she was just a maiden. His swollen deformed feet served as a reminder of what his parents had done to him when he was born and were a major give away too. 

I knew who he was… Anyone would have known. My dear friend Cassandra would be able to tell you that soothsaying is only a matter of carefully looking at the clues you have at hand and using them and some basic probability calculations to work out what will happen. But clever, perceptive women are rarely listened to, and Cassandra’s tears were tears of frustration at not being listened to, not because she was sad.

Do you know what question I asked him? Of course it wasn’t the one about man’s three ages. Any six-year-old can solve that one. 

I asked him what happened when a man met his father and killed him. I asked him what would happen if this man went on to marry his mother. I asked him about the monstruous children she would bear this hypothetical man. 

He didn’t answer. 

He knew what I was getting at though. 

He was too sure of himself to listen and think of the consequences. 

He didn’t answer. 

The oracle in Delphes had already told him what was going to happen. 

He didn’t answer. 

That is because didn’t want to stop and think of the consequences of his actions. 

He didn’t answer. 

His face went all red, a vein started to pulsate very fast on his temple. 

He didn’t answer.

He killed me instead. 

Thus freeing himself of the need to answer. 

He raped me first of course. 

I had asked for it, after all. 

So here I am, dead as a doornail. The Sphynx, the terror of travellers in Ancient Greece was killed by Oedipus’s rightful masculine wrath. 

But this isn’t the end… 

I live on. I live on in every girl who would rather go to the library than play with dolls. I live on in every girl who wants to build bridges instead of making cupcakes. I live on in every daughter who exhausts her father with her endless questions.

Medusa… Medusa lives on in every angry woman venting her frustration on a punching bag or in a kickboxing class, in every woman who is out there marching for women’s rights, in every nasty woman standing in an agora and facing up to the patriarchy with her words and anger. 

Here she is, standing by my side, smiling, tall, strong, face bare and hair uncombed, she is wearing army fatigues and combat boots… She still has that arresting glare. The dirty knife she has in her hand has dribbled a little blood over my copy of Oedipus Rex, I think this is quite apt, so I won’t clean it off.

Armies of Sirens are leaving beauticians salons, flipping their shiny hair away from their beautiful faces with red-taloned hands. With their high heels and sexy clothes, they aren’t aiming for mens’ jugular anymore, they are aiming lower, no… not for their hearts… it’s the wallet they are going for silly!

Cassandra isn’t crying anymore. She is watching us, assessing, calculating. She has a pretty clear idea of what is going to happen. And it makes her smile. 

And very soon… 

You’ll see it too.