Double the Romance, Double the Fun
An Excerpt from We First Met in Ithaca, or Was It Eden?
Penelope suspects that the stranger might be the real Odysseus, impossible though that is. He insists that he isn’t, but he has a smirk on his face when he says that, daring her to believe and at the same time daring her not to believe.
She realizes that if he isn’t Odysseus, he would claim that he is. And if he really is Odysseus, he would never admit that he is. His denial is an affirmation. He wants to fool her. He wants to win her a second time, twenty years after the first. And he savors the irony of proving her unfaithful by seducing her himself, in the guise of a stranger.
So, she tells him she thinks he’s a liar, a wily and brilliant stranger. And she plots with him, how to prove his purported identity to the public.
He has a scar on his thigh. She sends him to a tattoo artist to get it modified to correspond with Odysseus’ scar from the boar hunt, based on a description provided by his old nurse, Eurycleia. And she repeatedly rehearses with him the scene of the bed, which Odysseus had fashioned from a living tree. Then she stages that scene so it is witnessed by her faithful handmaid, the daughter of Actoris, the one person aside from her and Odysseus who knows the secret of the bed, so she can attest to the spontaneity and sincerity of his response.
Hence, when Penelope officially recognizes him as her long-lost husband, and everyone believes her, Odysseus thinks that she is lying, in collusion with him. To bolster his charade, he tells the daughter of Actoris that he isn’t Odysseus, in case she might have guessed that, and he has her promise not to let anyone know.
The daughter of Actoris is confused. In confidence, she confronts Penelope, ‘Why is he lying about lying? And why are you going along with that? Surely, by now, you know he is Odysseus.’
Penelope replies, ‘Of course. He plays his part too well. I have no doubt that he is Odysseus, but I don’t want him to know that I know. He’s delighted to have fooled me. And he believes that I’ve fallen in love with him twice, a bond like no other. That’s my gift to him.’
