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.

I search for a word to describe her; I cannot help that; my belief that a successful phrase – words, that is – can capture or even produce every phenomenon and every event, will outlive me. But where she is concerned I fail.

Polyxena. She was the other woman. She was the woman I could not be. She had everything I lacked.

Now I will have a talk with myself about Polyxena. About the guilt which cannot be extinguished, not if Clytemnestra were to murder me twenty times over. Polyxena was the last name spoken between Aeneas and me, the occasion of our last (perhaps our only) misunderstanding. He believed that it was on her account that I could not leave with him, and he tried to convince me that I could not help my dead sister by staying. But I knew that, if I knew anything. We did not have time to finish talking about my refusal to go with him, which had to do not with the past but with the future. Aeneas is alive. He will learn of my death. If he is the same man I love, he will continue to wonder why I chose captivity and death rather than him. Perhaps he will understand even without my help what it was that I had to reject at the cost of my life: submission to a role contrary to my nature.

The ‘we’ that I clung to grew transparent, feeble, more and more unprepossessing, and consequently I was more and more out of touch with my ‘I.’

Vacillating and fragile and amorphous was the ‘we’ I used, went on using as long as I possibly could. It included my father, but did it any longer include me?

One shouldn’t give up on anyone until he’s dead.’ I felt ashamed without being able to agree with him. As far as I could see, he had no dealings with the gods. But he believed in people. When it came to that, he was younger than all of us. It was at his place, under the changing foliage of the giant fig tree, that we began to live our life of freedom; in the middle of the war, completely unprotected, surrounded by an ever-growing horde of people armed to the teeth.

He knew everything there was to know about wood and trees. And the figures he carved when we sat around together, he then gave away like a prize; they became a sign by which we could recognise each other.

“Try to understand, Mother,” he said. “We want to spare you. The things we have to talk about in our council, now in wartime, are no longer the concern of women.”’

‘Quite right,’ said Anchises. ‘Now they are the concern of children.’

Anchises. If only Anchises were here. If he were with me I could bear anything. He did not allow you to fear that anything could be unbearable, no matter what happened. Yes, the unbearable did exist. But why fear it long before it arrives!