A pause.
“One thing led to another,” I said.
“I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.”
I had no idea what a cynic was but I knew what he meant. “I wasn’t speaking in contempt. One thing does lead to another. There’s no harm in that. How else would husbands and wives ever come to love each other? She needed a man. And he was kind and noble and handsome and shipwrecked. She fell in love with him. Any woman would.”
“Let it be an omen,” the poet murmured.
“But did he fall in love with her?”
“Yes. He did. She was beautiful, fiery, passionate. Any man would. But…”
“He was still mourning for Creusa.”
“No. His wife, his city, that was all behind him. Far back. Years and lands and seas between them. He didn’t look back. But he didn’t know how to look forward. He was caught in the moment, in the present time. His father’s death was a hard blow to him. He had depended on Anchises, obeyed him even when the old man led them astray. When he died and took the past with him, Aeneas felt the future was gone too. He didn’t know how to go on. The storm that scattered his fleet and took them off course, to lands they didn’t know—there was a storm like that in his soul. He’d lost his way.”
“What was his way?”
“Here. To Italy. To Latium. He knew that.”
“Why couldn’t his future have been in Africa? Why shouldn’t he stay and help the queen build her city and be happy with her?” I spoke reasonably, though in fact I did not want him to have done that. I counted on the poet’s argument.
But he didn’t argue. He shook his head. After a while he said, pursuing his thought, “It was a storm that brought them together, too. While they were out hunting. They got separated from the rest of the hunting party. There was rain, hail, they took refuge in a cave. And so…”
“Did they marry?” I asked after a while.
“Dido took their love for marriage, called it marriage. He did not. He was right.”
“Why?”
“Not even need and love can defeat fate, Lavinia. Aeneas’ gift is to know his fate, what he must do, and do it. In spite of need. In spite of love.”
“So what did he do?”
“He left her.”
“He ran away?”
“He ran away.”
“What did she do?”
“She killed herself.”
I had not expected that. I thought she would send out ships after Aeneas, pursue him, take fiery revenge. I could not like this African queen but I could not possibly despise her. Yet suicide seemed a coward’s answer to betrayal. At last I said so.
“You do not know what despair is,” the poet said gently. “May you never know.”
I accepted that. I knew what despair was. It was where my mother lived after her sons died. But I had not lived there myself.
“It was a hard death,” he said. “Her sword went wide of the heart, and the wound killed her only slowly. She told them to light the pyre she lay on before she was dead. He saw the great fire of it from out at sea.”
“And knew what it was?”
“No. Maybe.”
“His soul must cringe in him every time he thinks of that. Weren’t his people ashamed of him?”
“Even if he’d called himself king there, it would never have been their country. And Dido had stopped building the city, dropped the reins of government. She’d lost her self-respect, she couldn’t think of anything but him. Things weren’t going right. They were glad to get him away from there.” After a time he said, “He did see Dido, down in the underworld. She turned away. She refused to speak to him.”
That seemed only right. But there was an awful sadness in the story, an awful shame and sorrow, an unbearable injustice. I felt so sorry for all three of them, Creusa, Dido, Aeneas, that I could not say anything. We sat a long time in silence.
“Tell me of happier things,” the poet said in his beautiful, gentle voice. “How do you spend your days?”
“You know how the daughter of a house spends her days.”
“Yes, I do. I had an older sister, in Mantua. But this is not Mantua, and our father wasn’t a king…” He waited; I said nothing. He said, “On feast days the chief men of the city come to dine at the king’s table, and visitors from other cities of Latium, and perhaps allies from farther away—and your suitors, of course. Tell me about them.”
I sat for a while in the darkness. The rain had passed over and stars were beginning to shine overhead and through the leaves of the forest around us. “I come here to get away from them. I don’t want to talk about them, please.”
“Not even Turnus? Isn’t he very handsome, very brave?”
“Yes.”
“Not handsome and brave enough to move a girl’s heart?”
“Ask my mother,” I said.
At that he was silent. When he spoke again he had changed his tone. “Who are your friends, then, Lavinia?”
“Silvia. Maruna. Some of the other girls. Some of the old women.”
“Silvia who has a pet stag?”
“Yes. We saw it down this way, Maruna and I. It was following a doe, just like a dog after a bitch. A dog with antlers. It made us laugh.”
“Males in love are ridiculous,” he said. “They can’t help it.”
“How do you know about Silvia’s stag?”
“It came to me.”
“You know everything, don’t you?”
“No. I know very little. And what I thought I knew of you—what little I thought of at all—was stupid, conventional, unimagined. I thought you were a blonde!…But you can’t have two love stories in an epic. Where would the battles fit? In any case, how could one possibly end a story with a marriage?”
“It does seem more like a beginning than an end,” I said.
We both brooded.
“It’s all wrong,” he said. “I will tell them to burn it.”
Whatever he meant, I did not like the sound of it. “And then look back from out at sea and see the great pyre flaming?” I said.
He gave his short laugh. “You have a cruel streak, Lavinia.”
“I don’t think so. Maybe I wish I did. Maybe I’ll need to be cruel.”
“No. No. Cruelty is for the weak.”
“Oh, not only the weak. Isn’t a master stronger than the slave he beats? Wasn’t Aeneas cruel in leaving Dido? But she was the weak one.”
He stood up, a tall shadow in the dimness. He paced back and forth a little. He said: “In the underworld, Aeneas met an old friend, the Trojan prince Deiphobos. Paris, who ran off with Helen, was killed in the war. So the Trojans gave Helen to his brother Deiphobos.”
“Why didn’t they put her out the gate and tell her to go back to her husband?”
“The Trojan women asked that question; but the Trojan men didn’t hear it… So, then, the Greeks took the city, and Menelaus came looking for his wife, the woman they fought the war for. And Helen met him. She took her old husband to the bedroom where her new husband was sound asleep. He hadn’t heard the sounds of battle. She hadn’t wakened him. She’d stolen his sword. So he woke to his death, the Greek stabbing him, hacking him, chopping off his hands, slicing his face in half, crazy for blood, and the woman looking on. And so Deiphobos went down into the dark. Down there, years after, Aeneas saw him, his shadow, still maimed, mutilated, unhealed. They talked a little, but the guide broke in—no time for this, Aeneas must hurry on. And the murdered man said, ‘Go on, go, my glory. I am gone. I join the crowd, return to darkness. I hope you find a better fate.’ And speaking, he turned away.”