Worlds of eloquence have been lost.
It could never end. The sun was stuck in the sky, a page had gone missing from the book, and it would always be summer as long as they didn’t breathe too hard or ask for too much, always the summer when they were nineteen and were finally, finally almost, finally perhaps almost on the brink of saying good-bye to the moment when everything was still in front of them.
5.2
5.3
On November 7, 1965, Ferguson came to the sixteenth book of Homer’s Odyssey. He was sitting at a desk in a small maid’s room on the sixth floor of an apartment building in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, which had been his home for the past three weeks, and now that Odysseus has finally made it back to Ithaka after his endless journey from Troy, gray-eyed Athena has disguised him in the garb and body of a wizened old vagabond, and as the man of many wiles sits with the swineherd Eumaeus in a mountain hut on the outskirts of town, in walks Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, who was no more than an infant when his father set off for Troy twenty years ago and still knows nothing about his father’s return, having himself just returned from a long and dangerous voyage, and as Eumaeus leaves the hut and heads for the palace in order to tell Penelope, the young man’s mother, that Telemachus has returned to Ithaka unharmed, father and son are alone together for the first time, and while the father is fully aware that he is looking at his son, the son still knows nothing.
Athena then shows up masquerading as a tall and handsome Ithakan woman, seen only by Odysseus and therefore invisible to the son, and when she beckons the father to step outside for a moment, she tells him that the time for dissembling is over and that he must reveal himself to Telemachus now. “Saying no more” (as rendered in the newly published Fitzgerald translation that was sitting on Ferguson’s desk) “she tipped her golden wand upon the man, / making his cloak pure white, and the knit tunic / fresh around him. Lithe and young she made him, / ruddy with sun, his jawline clean, the beard / no longer grey upon his chin.”
There was no God, Ferguson kept telling himself. There never had been and never would be a single God, but there were gods, many gods from many and all parts of the world, among them the Greek gods who lived on Mount Olympus, Athena, Zeus, Apollo, and the various others who had gamboled their way through the first two hundred and ninety-five pages of The Odyssey, and what the gods enjoyed more than anything else was meddling in the affairs of men. They simply couldn’t help themselves, it was what they had been born to do. In the same way that beavers couldn’t help themselves from building dams, Ferguson supposed — or cats couldn’t help themselves from torturing mice. Immortal beings, yes, but beings with too much time on their hands, which meant that nothing could stop them from cooking up their juicy, often ghastly entertainments.
When Odysseus reenters the hut, Telemachus is thunderstruck by the transformation of the old man into what he now concludes must be a god. But Odysseus, on the verge of crumbling into tears, barely able to get the words out of his mouth, quietly says: “No god. Why take me for a god? No, no. / I am that father whom your boyhood lacked / and suffered pain for lack of. I am he.”
That was the first stab, the tip of the blade puncturing Ferguson’s skin somewhere in the boneless, unprotected area between his rib cage and groin, for reading the words of Odysseus’s short reply produced the same effect in him that would have been produced if the lines had read: It’s going to be a cold day, Archie. Remember to wear your scarf to school.
Then the blade went all the way in: “throwing / his arms around this marvel of a father / Telémakhos began to weep. Salt tears / rose from the wells of longing in both men, / and cries burst from both as keen and fluttering / as those of the great taloned hawk, / whose nestlings farmers take before they fly. / So helplessly they cried, pouring out tears, / and might have gone on weeping so until sundown.”
It was the first time Ferguson had wept over a book. He had shed numerous tears in the darkness of both empty and crowded movie theaters, sometimes at the most soft-headed, sentimental rubbish, had choked up more than once while listening to the Saint Matthew Passion with Gil, especially at that spot on the first side of the third disk when the tenor’s voice suddenly catches with emotion, but books had never done that to him, not even the saddest, most moving books, and yet now in the dim November light of Paris tears were falling on page 296 of his one-dollar-and-forty-five-cent paperback edition of The Odyssey, and when he turned away from the poem and tried to look through the window of his little room, everything in the room was blurred.
THE ODYSSEY WAS the second book on Gil’s reading list. The Iliad had come first, and after plowing his way through the two epic poems by the anonymous bard or bards who had been given the name Hómēros, Ferguson had promised to read ninety-eight more books over the next two years, including Greek tragedies and comedies, Virgil and Ovid, portions of the Old Testament (King James version), Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Inferno, roughly half the contents of Montaigne’s Essays, no fewer than four tragedies and three comedies by Shakespeare, Milton’s Paradise Lost, selections from Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant, The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Norton Anthology of American Poetry, as well as British, American, French, and Russian novels by such writers as Fielding-Sterne-Austen, Hawthorne-Melville-Twain, Balzac-Stendhal-Flaubert, and Gogol-Tolstoy-Dostoyevsky. Gil and Ferguson’s mother both hoped their 4-F, ex-book-thief son would change his mind about going to college in a year or two, but if Ferguson persisted in shunning the benefits of a formal education, at least those one hundred titles would give him some knowledge of some of the books every educated person was supposed to have read.