Cassandra

It was for his sake, whom I hated, and for the sake of my father, whom I loved, that I had avoided screaming their state secret out loud. There was a grain of calculation in my self-renunciation. Eumelos saw through me. My father did not.

So that alongside the river of heroic songs this tiny rivulet, too, may reach those faraway, perhaps happier people who will live in times to come.’

I wanted to test him. ‘We could give Helen back to Menelaus,’ I said. Again he smiled his painful smile: ‘Could you really?’

Marpessa is singing a song to the twins. She learned it, as I did, from her mother, Parthena the nurse. It says: ‘When the child is sleeping, his soul, a beautiful bird, flies to the silver olive and then slowly mounts toward the setting sun.’ Soul, beautiful bird. I felt its movements in my breast, sometimes light as a feather’s touch, sometimes violent and painful.

the love rushed out with a river of tears.

When we saw each other for the last time, he wanted to give me his ring, the snake ring. My eyes said no. He threw it from the cliff into the sea. The shining arc it described in the sunlight burned into my heart. No one will ever learn these all-important things about us. The scribes’ tablets, baked in the flames of Troy, transmit the palace accounts, the records of grain, urns, weapons, prisoners. There are no signs for pain, happiness, love. That seems to me an extreme misfortune.

Now his wife is butchering Agamemnon.

Presently it will be my turn.

I notice that I cannot believe what I know.

That is how it always was, how it always will be.

I did not know it would be so difficult, not even when I realised with horror that we were going to disappear without a trace: Myrine, Aeneas, I.

I longed for love unbearably, a longing which only one man could appease; my dreams left no doubt about that.

I began to pay heed to my body, which – who would have thought it! – obeyed the guidance of dreams.

Everything in the past was pale premonition, uncompleted longing. Aeneas was the reality; and faithful to reality, craving reality, I wanted to cling to it. At the moment he could do nothing here, he said. He said he was leaving. ‘Leave,’ I said. Oh, how good he was at disappearing.