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an excerpt from: Like a seashell on the beach, Calypso disconsolately repeated the name of Ulysses to the foam that carries ships afar, unmindful in her sorrow of her immortal self. The seagulls in attendance took flight when she approached for fear of being consumed by the fire of her lamentations. The laughter of the meadows, the cries of the fine gravel, all the caresses of the landscape made her miss more cruelly the absent lover who had taught her to perceive them. What good did it do her to peer toward infinity, if she could see only the bitter plains of despair? In vain did the island shores blossom upon the passage of their queen, attentive only to the ebb and flow of the tides. Luckily, a boat broke to bits at the feet of Calypso. Two abstractions issued from it. The first, not yet twenty, looked so much like Ulysses that the shrubs, by the very way he folded them, recognized Telemachus, his son, who had yet to bend a woman in his arms. The second entity passed the comprehension of the sandy walks, of the desolate goddess, of eternal spring reigning in these fabulous lands; nobody, whether a nymph or even a loftier deity, could recognize Minerva under the aged features of Mentor. Meanwhile, Calypso joyfully rediscovered her fugitive lover in that young castaway advancing toward her. Her foreknowledge of this body which she had never glimpsed before troubled her more than the shining spots of seaweed the surging waters had pasted on Telemachus’s polished limbs. Feeling womanly, she gave a false display of anger and cried out: "Strangers, flee from here if you value your lives. Men are banished from my domains;" but her blushful countenance belied her speech. The young traveler bowed with the grace of a remembrance, saying, "Madam, you who appear so beautiful that I might well take you for a goddess, could you look without pity on a youth in quest of himself throughout the world, for indeed he pursues his own image: my father ceaselessly carried far away from me by the very same fury of tempests and concepts that thrusts me naked at your feet" — This father, who might he be? — They call him Ulysses, and what good does it do him that his name is famous all over Greece and Asia? His fatherland is forbidden him; the waves won’t spare him a single error; and his wisdom, far from steering him clear of reefs, always plunges him into new dangers. Without hope I left my mother, Penelope; I roam the Universe to bring her back Ulysses, engulfed perhaps in its depths, and, sometimes, I discover in men’s minds the trace of the hero who eludes me and whose fortunes, if the bizarre play of passions ever tossed him on your isle, you would not, O Goddess, hide from his son, Telemachus.? |
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