The Stranger

We used to wake up on hot summer days skin sticky, mouth parched, hair tousled with sleep. We would splash water over our dresses and head down the stairs holding our wet clothes tight against our thighs. Sometimes our mothers would catch us sneaking out and hand us the household’s dirty laundry, a reminder to not get too cute about our lives. 

We were down at the beach playing around, the cleaned laundry draped over branches and flapping in the wind, when a naked man emerged from behind a bush. Girls, girls, he called out to us. My friends ran away shrieking, from fear and delight. We all came from good families and had been kept from men all our lives, not like the girls now. We didn’t know men but we had our stories. They were covered with hair, Larissa said, miming pulling tufts from her arm. They had something terrible between their legs, a bruise, a fleshy tumor, said Philomela in her low soft voice. We believed Philomela because the thought of something terrible made us shiver and we wanted to shiver, to believe that our desires were uncontrollable and needed to be kept in check. 

Back then I was a sight to behold, tall with limbs made like finely wrought gold. I looked like what I was: the daughter of a king, the equal of any man. The stranger’s body was so soaked with seawater it was one burst blister. He flung his hands out like a beggar and said he was a shipwrecked sailor from Ogygia looking for a way back home. Clothe me, feed me, pity me, he said. 

He hooked the mother in me with those words. Come back you idiots he isn’t going to hurt us, I called out to my friends. They slunk back, eyes wide and brazen when they saw him standing next to me. He held a branch in front of himself but we could still see everything. Give him some clothes, I said to them. Philomela stepped forward, her eyes averted, and handed him one of her father’s tunics. He murmured something to her that made her blush. She never told us what he said, she was always the best out of all of us at keeping secrets. 

After he went down to the sea to bathe and change, we circled each other, clasped hands and asked each other the same questions over and over again: who is he, what did he say to Nausicaa, what did he say to Philomela, what did he want. Occasionally, one of us would burst into high-pitched laughter, egged on by the unreality of the situation. A man is here, we seemed to be all thinking, a naked man emerged from the sea and is now washing himself next to us. 

My mother said back in her day the gods would talk to us and we could talk back. If you woke up in the middle of the night and listened you could hear Athena lecturing Jason, Aphrodite whispering to Paris, she said. So when the stranger returned from the sea I thought - finally, the gods are here, the stories are real. He strode towards us, moving as though his body was made of a single piece of beaten bronze instead of a piece of flesh covered with oozing sores and red lacerations. He stood before us as straight as a thrown spear; and in his gaze, blued over with sorrow, I saw that it was possible for someone to lose everything and still need nothing. I have never met something like him and none like him since. 

Penelope: Was this the man you fell in love with? Or was it the beggar? Tell me, how did you keep the wanderer with you?

I waited with him while my friends gathered the laundry. He kept on looking out towards the sea as though it was a past lover and not the orchestrator of his current circumstance. I asked him questions and he smiled while he answered them. I saw myself as he must have seen me - a young girl, wide-eyed and ignorant.

Can I give you some advice, I asked.

Of course, he said. 

Go see my mother first and get her on your side, she is the one who really rules here. 

He thanked me and said he would do as I said. We sat with our laundry and watched him walk up to the palace. Who is he, asked Acantha, quietly for once. My future husband, I said. 

The girls screeched with laughter. You can’t marry him, they said. Why not? I asked. You just can’t, said Philomela, you’re going to marry a king or a prince, not some nameless piece of debris washed up on our shores like a jellyfish. What about you? Acantha asked Philomela. It doesn’t matter, she said with a shrug, my father will pick. 

I saw the stranger only once after that. Sequestered with the women, I couldn’t get near him but word filtered back to us of the stories he told my father, tales of giants, sea monsters, beautiful enchantresses. When I started to weep and wail at the possibility of never seeing him again, my mother slapped me - she who had never laid a hand on me before. She was frightened; she saw in me, as I see now in the young girls around me, a recklessness rimmed red with tragedy. 

Odysseus! My stranger. The man of many paths, many ways, many names. Our children would have been sea-farers, magicians, crafty-tongued devils. I met you briefly on the sands of my father’s kingdom but I have never forgotten the image of your body bent in penitence on the beach, the wanderer brought low, the strategist unable to see.

My father gave him ships and gifts - on my mother’s advice. Behind the hasty preparations, the speed at which things were decided, I can see her hand. Back then she was young, black-hair streaked with steel, and I can imagine her grasping my father’s head in her strong hands, saying to him in her dry ironic voice that to fete strangers with endless feasts was all fine and good but strangers have a home too, let him go back to his island, to his wife, to the palace decimated by his wife’s suitors. Barrels of salted pork appeared on ship decks; men were wrestled out of their wives’ beds and told they were going on a long voyage; feats of strength were set up as a distraction while my mother and her women mended sails by lamplight. 

On the day of his departure, I crept from our quarters to stand in the shadows near the palace entrance. I looked for him amongst the servants carrying heavily laden baskets of food and sailors with thick coils of rope looped around their shoulders. But no dark corner could ever hide me from my mother’s eyes for long, she who knew every inch of the palace like the whorls on her knuckles. She saw me from across the hall and flicked her fingers at me to scram. I was about to retreat when I saw him.

Stranger, I said. He paused and bowed when he saw that it was me. 

Princess, he said, how kind of you to see me off. 

Stranger, don’t forget I was the one who found you first. I am the one who gave your life back to you.

I wouldn’t dare forget, he said, if I ever arrive home safely I will say it was because of Nausicaa.

Penelope: Was he like this with you? Impeccably polite, unbearably gracious, his manner tuned to a half-note to harmonize with his listener’s wants and desires. He was so close I could have grazed the edge of his cloak, plucked the red from his beard. 

When I was young girl and enamored with the thin horizon bordering my world, I would go down to the sea by myself. We were sailors and from a young age I was taught to respect and fear the water but for me, for a while, it was a part of my play. Crouching by the shore, I would use clay pots and conical shells to scoop up the silver and blue. I laid them around my bed as a charm, replenishing them so that every night I fell asleep lulled by the sounds of the distant sea.

I grew older, found playmates, and over time the clay pots dried, the shells broke and I was surrounded by a circle of cracked vessels lined with white salt. As I threw it all away, I saw that the horizon in the distance was still the same. I saw that any desire was small and short when measured against the sea.

Goodbye stranger, I said.

Over time, we stopped going down to the beach. I married a neighboring king, a cousin of mine. Larissa married a man who forbade her from seeing us. Philomela’s husband twisted her arm until it shattered, killing her. Acantha remained alone and wore her bitterness twisted on her head like a crown. My mother died on a winter day while my father was out raiding. She had been mending one of his shirts and was found later by one of the maids, a threaded needle in one hand, his shirt clasped to her chest. 

The bards sing that after he returned to Ithaca and righted his house, he sat Penelope down to finally talk about the ten long years he was gone. He wept for his lost men, laughed about his trick on Polyphemus.

Then the sea journey to Phaeacia. Naked, except for Leukothea's scarf. Alone on a plank of wood as the sea pounded his head and filled his mouth with salt. He despaired. He railed at his fate. He wished he had died at Troy. The man of many changes was gone. What remained was a naked, tired body adrift in a vast, angry sea.

Penelope: Is this when you watered his hands with your tears? He could have stayed in Phaeacia with me, in Aeaea with Circe, in Ogygia with Calypso. Instead he risked his life, faced his death many times, to come back to you. You expect much from your men. Perhaps that's why they always come back.

Land. He pushed onwards. He emerged and clutched at the sand, crying from someplace deep inside him. A brief moment of respite. Then onwards. Always onwards with him. In the distance he heard girls laughing, linens slapping against hard rock. He approached as gently as he could but they still scattered in his path, like droplets in the morning sun. All except for one. She strode toward him, a young Artemis, tall and golden-limbed.

Penelope: Your man of many names, what name did he give for me?