Cassandra

and when I told her in a fit of emotion that I would never forget certain things she had done, she replied coolly: ‘Yes, you will.’ It has always upset me when other people knew more about me, or thought they knew more, than I did.

‘What do you mean, what about my part in it? Whom have I hurt? I, the weak one? What harm have I done all these people who are stronger than I am?’

‘Why did you make them strong?’

Yes. It hurt. I raised myself a tiny bit closer to the surface, to observe the pain. Groaning, I endured it.

A long time after I had grown still, I heard it say: ‘This is not the way you can punish them.’ These were the first human words I had heard for such a long time, it took me an eternity to understand what they meant.

there is a comic element in all madness. Those who learn to recognise and to use it have won.

Hecuba came, severe. Priam, anxious. My sisters, timid. Parthena, my nurse, sympathetic. Marpessa, reserved. No one was any use. Not to mention the solemn helplessness of Panthous. I let myself sink deeper, experimentally, in tiny thrusts.

Two adversaries had chosen the dead landscape of my soul as their battlefield and were engaged in a life-and-death struggle. Only madness stood between me and the intolerable pain which these two would otherwise have inflicted on me, I thought. So I clung to the madness as it clung to me.

To be forced to give birth to what will destroy you: the terror beyond terror. I could not stop producing madness, a pulsating gullet that spat me out, then sucked me in, spat me out, then sucked me in.

No member of our family had ever dared to speak in such a way. But I, I alone saw. Or did I really ‘see’? What was it, then? I felt. Experienced – yes, that’s the word. For it was, it is, an experience when I ‘see,’ when I ‘saw.’ Saw that the outcome of this hour was our destruction.

But when he was lying in her arms he used to cry out another woman’s name: ‘Helen, Helen.’ He said Aphrodite had promised her to him. But had anyone heard of Aphrodite, our dear goddess of love, driving a woman to a man who does not love her, who does not even know her?

Ominous, the empty space that had formed around me.