Penelope and Ulysses Read online

And all the while,

  her unheard song became louder

  in the echoes of my silence.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: My love. We cannot escape the turbulence

  of the forever making and breaking decisions

  of our nature and our destiny.

  We cannot escape the sea.

  She lives inside us and outside us.

  We are floating in her and on her.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: The untranslated, unopposed song

  became as intimate to me as my breathing

  and I realised that her hands reached out

  to touch me.

  They were your hands, Penelope.

  Your long fingers

  and pale, delicate skin [touches her hair].

  The seaweed had become your hair

  that was entangling me

  and binding me to her.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: “There is the sea and who will drink it dry.”22

  YOUNG ULYSSES: I did not struggle, I did not fight.

  I floated to the bottom of her world

  only to be tossed and spat out.

  I woke to find you sleeping next to me.

  I had been thrown and I caught you

  in the tree

  that we have made our bed.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: What do think this means?

  Why do you and I continue

  to swim where the mermaid

  loses her glory?

  YOUNG ULYSSES: This is how we are made. By our choices.

  The choices that have become

  our destiny and journey in life.

  And yet, my love,

  you have a different destiny from mine.

  You are a weaver of the golden threads,

  faithful and devoted to finding

  the anchor of my threaded heart.

  You are devoted to the unwritten laws,

  of the golden threads of love.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: I am a weaver of dreams,

  stars, rivers, mountains

  and my home, the tree.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: Penelope you are not weak,

  and although you weave dreams

  you are not absent from life,

  like so many women and men

  who seek only the security and safety

  of the known and taught.

  Theirs is domesticated love that prevents them

  from taking the journey into their life

  and into the life of the other.

  My beautiful wild bird and silent siren,

  I fear that the world will not allow us

  to conspire for too long with each other.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: Will others come to separate us?

  YOUNG ULYSSES: We do not always steer the course

  of our vessel. There are times that the sea of life

  will remove us from all

  that we have known and loved.

  There are times the force and might of others

  crash into our vessel,

  into our life,

  into our world

  and nothing,

  nothing

  remains the same.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: The seas and storms of our lives,

  the crises of our lives,

  remove us from what we have known

  as the lighthouse.

  In these crises we either remain devoted

  to this love or to our betrayal

  of all that is life-giving.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: I hear many drowning sailors,

  long before the sirens expose the secret

  of their hearts. Their pleading and curses

  can be heard in the winds by all others

  who have not been shipwrecked in their lives.

  Their laments and tears can be heard

  as we sail into the dark waters

  of the crises of our life: the breaking away

  from all that gave us safety and security,

  when the island has been sunk,

  the tree has been cut down,

  and we surrender to all

  that makes and breaks us.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: I sense we will be tossed

  and turned inside out.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: Haunted and hunted

  by something that is moving,

  breaking, creeping, and crawling

  towards our shore.

  I can hear the moaning of the sea

  as the burdened and overloaded ships

  creak with the weight of lead and death.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: Nothing will remain the same.

  All will change.

  We will all be scattered

  away from our homes,

  away from our loved ones,

  away from the safety of the light.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: I know my time with you,

  I know my time without you.

  I have known you in absence

  and now in presence.

  And there will come a time

  in which I will love you

  without touching your body.

  I love you in absence, once again.

  BOTH: In that absence,

  you will become as intimate to me

  as my breathing.

  [They breathe into each other’s mouth.]

  YOUNG ULYSSES: How does one love

  a wild bird that seeks to live

  in the heart of a navigator

  without domesticating or confining?

  YOUNG PENELOPE: Your physical tenderness and softness

  reduces me to my knees. [falls to her knees]

  YOUNG ULYSSES: I fall to my knees and give thanks [falls to his knees]

  to all that makes and breaks me

  for allowing me to experience

  the miracle of woman.

  My woman!

  YOUNG PENELOPE: Come kiss me,

  my beautiful and dangerous Ulysses.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: I love you with such a youthful passion

  that I will be able to taste you on my skin

  when I cannot be with you.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: No heaven or hell will remove you

  from the sea that consumes me,

  the sea that brought you to me.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: The sea that calls me

  and claims me as hers.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: The sea that I had to travel to find you.

  The sea that will keep me from you,

  my love,

  my love.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: The women I knew before you

  all had your face.

  All the sirens, witches, and goddesses

  who enter my sleeping state

  will have to have your face,

  your hands, your voice, your breasts, your smell.

  I will always see your face

  in every woman.

  So, tell me my clever wife,

  when I started training

  and teaching you

  how to stand in war,

  how to defend yourself,

  I did not suspect

  that you had mastered the craft of the sword.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: Why are you surprised?

  YOUNG ULYSSES: And why should I not be surprised?

  I have always counted and depended

  on your clever and cunning ways

  in reaching a destination

  without being heard or seen.

  I know
the answers

  as you know my questions.

  I suspect that you have been training secretly

  not only for the battles of war

  but also for the knowledge

  of our poets and dancers.

  I suspect you are acquainted

  with the philosophers.

  I believe that you have spoken also

  with Pericles’s concubine,

  the one who so impressed Plato.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: Aspesia?

  YOUNG ULYSSES: What does the famous Aspesia say about Pericles

  and how she seduced

  all his senses—all six of them?

  Think of this, Penelope.

  She would be a woman of your heart.

  There was Pericles—married.

  Not happily married, but married all the same.

  He made laws about the way

  other men should live

  and how they should

  conduct themselves in private and political life.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: And just when he had denounced

  the lover and fool in the world,

  he fell in love, head and all ten toes, with Aspesia.

  He paid his friend to seduce

  and convince his legal wife

  to run away with him

  so that he (Pericles) could have a life

  with his beloved Aspesia.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: Do you think that she also

  was a weaver and spinner

  of dreams and stars,

  and the promise of dawn?

  YOUNG PENELOPE: I have come to the conclusion

  that very few fall in love, very few can love.

  Rather, the fear of being alone

  makes them delude themselves

  that they are mated for life.

  Security, comfort, prestige, acceptance.

  Fear, fear, fear, fear.

  The fear of being alone.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: You, on the other hand, Penelope,

  are not afraid of being alone.

  You are not afraid to resist,

  to plot and plan.

  You are a master

  with the threads of the heart.

  “How I love a clever woman.”23

  YOUNG PENELOPE: The investigation of life:

  My place in the world

  and the world’s place in me.

  I do not want to change the world,

  but I do not want the world to change me.

  How can you say that you are alive, truly alive,

  if you do not search and investigate beyond,

  above and below the safety

  of taught things,

  below and above

  the safety of mediocrity?

  YOUNG ULYSSES: How can you love if you fear?

  YOUNG PENELOPE: As for me, my training with the sword

  and my discipline in the art of philosophical persuasion

  is to protect you and our son.

  It is to protect you, my love.

  You look surprised!

  You of all people should know

  that when life sets me a task

  I will continue to live in it

  until I can master it.

  I do not reveal myself

  as one of the hunted or the hunters

  in moments of danger and war.

  Nor do I show my weakness to my enemy.

  Therefore, one needs strategy,

  purpose, and planning

  to avoid the nets of either

  the slave or the master.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: And what of your dancing feet, Penelope?

  Will the hunter follow your tracks

  to the Dionysian worship and reverence for life?

  YOUNG PENELOPE: It was you who told me about

  the unknown philosopher

  who searched into

  the hidden things of life,

  into the seen things of death,

  and into the deep longing for the “eternal recurrence,”24

  the hidden and revealed things of life,

  and went mad.

  I have seen him dancing

  in Dionysian processions.

  He is the lover and the fool and he is near.

  He had mad dancing feet.

  You have to be a dancer

  to jump over the abyss.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: Is it over the abyss, or into the abyss?

  YOUNG PENELOPE: You jump into the abyss.

  How else will you know its secrets

  and find a way under it or above it?

  How else if you do not live in it?

  Did he not say that your friend

  should have the courage

  to be your enemy?

  YOUNG ULYSSES: Penelope, do you love me so deeply

  that you would risk my anger and rejection

  by telling me what I do not want to hear,

  what I do not want to face?

  Yes, Zarathustra did say

  that when you love,

  you should have the courage and strength

  to expose all parts,

  all the unspoken

  and all the hidden

  to the other.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: In our love there is no fear,

  no guilt, no shame,

  no rations, no compartments,

  only reverence and devotion.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: This is not an idealistic ideology;

  this is a way of life for me.

  As a warrior of many battles

  and many experiences

  in the struggle for life and death,

  I have come to realise the world

  has gone mad

  with either pain or indifference.

  Man has lost his way

  and struts around in his life,

  like a sleepwalker,

  and he is not in his life,

  and lives out his years

  as a shadow of himself.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: I could not have the passion and strength I have

  if I did not have the will to endure

  and ask for more.

  I have a deep love for the world

  and my place in it—

  not outside it,

  in it.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: You sing to me the song of the sirens,

  for you open my heart

  and reveal the fullness

  that multiplies in truth and beauty,

  and expose the complexity and diversity

  of my choices

  that have brought me to you.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: I am your whole,

  your equal, not your half.

  Not your “other half,”

  not the “little woman”

  who will pass with time,

  who will grow grey and vanish

  from your desire and passions,

  who will start as your lover,

  be transformed into wife,

  reduced to sister,

  and finally abandoned

  as a sexless partner.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: I would rather leave for foreign shores

  than to place such a yoke

  of convenience and commodity

  upon our love.

  I would leave, denouncing all

  that gives me security and safety

  rather than to face

  a loveless union,<
br />
  a cold body,

  and grasping hands.

  Did not your mad philosopher also say

  that when you stop loving me,

  you don’t understand me?

  YOUNG PENELOPE: Yes, Ulysses, Yes! I want you to burn for me.

  For how can you be truly alive

  if you do not have a fire in the belly?

  I wanted to tell you that I am the warrior

  who will be with you in all your battles,

  lost or won.

  I swear by my sword [lifts her sword],

  I am your army, Ulysses.

  I am the foot soldier you leave behind

  to keep the fire burning,

  to keep the fire of the lighthouse alive so that you will always find your way home, back to me.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: And who can convince the sea to be reasonable?

  Why does it create such strange creatures

  like you and I?

  Tell me, agape mou, if a fish and bird fall in love—

  as at times they will and do—

  when a bird and fish fall in love,

  where do they live?

  YOUNG PENELOPE: You and I are like the bird and the fish.

  Do we live in the sea or in the sky?

  Do we live in each other’s heart?

  Both of us are bound by our nature and choices—

  one feeds the other,

  and both of us have a separate destiny.

  We meet and love and pledge

  in the moments

  that we forge with our souls, as our eternity.

  Both of us will remain with each other

  when these moments

  of physical intimacy and discovery

  have been removed from us.

  In your absence

  there is a haunting presence.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: Penelope, my love,

  we are both navigators

  in the sea of the life.

  We travel and hide

  from all the world,

  and yet we are both found.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: Agape mou,

  you are the salt in my bread,

  the salt in my tears, the salt in my body.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: You consume me and spit me out,

  like a fish that flounders.

  I cannot live without being in you.

  There is no life unless I am swimming in you.

  YOUNG PENELOPE: You are a swimmer in life, Ulysses.

  In my past I have been in prison,

  in confinement, under house arrest.

  They even sealed the windows

  so that I could not see the sea or sky.

  But they could not seal the eyes

  of my searching and aching soul.

  YOUNG ULYSSES: I did not think that you lived.

  I thought that for some reason or other,

  men would have hunted you

  and netted you,