The Last Song of Orpheus Read online

  And I would tell you that I perceived her as song made flesh, and there is nothing I love more than song.

  5

  Eurydice was the daughter of King Creon, not the Creon who would one day be king in Thebes at the time when Oedipus was there, but another and earlier one, who ruled on the shores of the swift-flowing river Peneius in the green and lovely valley of Tempe that lies between Olympus and Ossa. He had promised her in marriage to Aristaeus, who is said by some to be one of Apollo’s many sons. Of that paternity I know nothing, nor can I tell you anything of the man, and certainly nothing good; but I do know that this Aristaeus was one who traveled widely, visiting such places as Sardinia and Sicily, and had several wives and begot a number of sons, and even had paid a call at my own Thrace and been initiated into the Mysteries of Dionysus. But all that happened long after he caught the eye of Creon and was affianced to that king’s daughter. If the gods were more gentle than they are, he would have married Eurydice as her father intended and they would perhaps have grown old together and been fated to be forgotten entirely by the makers of songs and plays. But the gods are not gentle.

  So it came to pass that I happened to be traveling through Tempe at the time of the betrothal of Eurydice and Aristaeus and sang at their betrothal-feast. Perhaps she bore no great love for Aristaeus, or, very probably, none at all; but like an obedient daughter she was fully intent on the marriage until the moment that her eye fell on me, and mine on her.

  I had sung often enough before that time of the shafts of Eros, and how they strike people all unawares and transform their lives in an instant. But until that moment my verses of Eros were mere verses, as any songmaker will make from time to time out of the materials that lie readily at hand, whether he has had experience of their meaning or not. Now everything changed. Eros, that wild boy with golden wings, who shows no respect for anything but the wanton commands of his mother Aphrodite, and sometimes does not respect even those, flew down upon us and pierced us both with his barbed arrows. The shaft made its way deep into my breast like a red-hot rod. It sent an intense throbbing sensation coursing through me, as painful as it was pleasurable, that kindled an unquenchable conflagration instantly within me. Eurydice’s sudden gasp told me that she had been struck as well; and Eurydice and I looked upon each other and I felt what I felt and she felt what she felt and in that moment the marriage of Aristaeus and Eurydice was brought to its end before it had even begun.

  Her father was troubled when she bore the news to him, for he knew that to disrupt a betrothal was a serious matter that often had somber consequences. But he was neither unwise nor cruel, and would not force her into a loveless match; and so Aristaeus was dismissed and the new betrothal was announced.

  Like any fond lover I believed that Eurydice was the fairest of all women, the equal of golden Aphrodite herself, and I made songs that said just that, knowing that Aphrodite would understand that I spoke as lovers speak and would not bear a grudge against my Eurydice for my rash comparison. In truth I have never beheld Aphrodite, but if she is more beautiful than my Eurydice was, she is beautiful indeed. For Eurydice was tall and slender, with gleaming golden hair and a delicate rosy bloom in her cheeks and skin softer than the silk the women wear in the empire of the yellow-skinned folk, and eyes of a brilliance and a clarity and a sheen that even a goddess might envy, and there was nothing about her that was not perfect. Thus I made the first song of Orpheus and Eurydice, which told of the accident of our meeting and the power of Eros’ shaft and the delight of our new love; and I think it is the happiest of all songs ever made. Certainly it is the happiest of mine.

  But, as I say, the gods are not gentle. Bleak omens hovered over our marriage from the start. At the wedding, the torch that the priest of Hymen carried smoked and sputtered, fouling the air and bringing tears to the eyes of all the guests. Old Creon tried to make light of it, telling us that the omen was propitious, that these were tears of joy. But I knew better, and, I am sure, so did he.

  If I had taken my bride back to Thrace at once, perhaps all would have been well. But that was not how things were meant to be. Thus King Creon asked us to tarry awhile at his court before we took our leave, and I agreed, and Eurydice and I lived in his palace as man and wife and in her arms I tasted all the joys that you mortals know so well. Everything was exactly as I knew it would be, and nevertheless each day was a fresh time of surprise and wonder. That is the paradox of my life, that I march constantly onward into that which is ordained for me and which I have experienced so many times before, and as each event befalls me it is both new and old, a recapitulation that is also a discovery.

  And all during that time the brooding Aristaeus, that dark and lustful man, was lurking in the woods nearby, nursing the wound of his rejection and planning his revenge. One morning when Eurydice was wandering in the meadows with her maids, he emerged from a thicket and seized her by the arm, and would have flung her down and taken her then and there. The maids clustered close, shrieking at him and pummeling him, and Eurydice wrested herself free of him and ran. But it was all to no avail, for in her frantic flight she trod upon a venomous serpent nesting hidden in the grass, and was bitten on the ankle and perished in a moment.

  I have never felt so much like a mortal as I did in the hour when her maids came to me, bearing lifeless Eurydice. With her I had experienced the wondrous ecstasies of love and now I experienced the bitter pain of grief. These are mortal things; and whatever part of me is mortal was shaken by them the way a tree is shaken in the storms of winter.

  So I put away my bright wedding clothes and donned the black cloak of mourning, and as the flames of her funeral pyre rose toward the heavens I sang a dirge for my lost Eurydice that brought torrents of rain from the sky; but the fire burned on and on even so, until the last of my Eurydice was consumed and I was left alone with my despair.

  I could find nothing to console me for my loss, neither in the philosophies of Egypt nor in the serene wisdom of Apollo nor even in my own music. Distraught, I drifted from land to land, singing the sad song of lost Eurydice over and again. But my singing gave me no solace. Nor was it welcomed by others. I wept, and everyone about me wept also. I cast such a pall of gloom over all who heard me that men feared my coming, and word traveled ahead of me that all should flee, for the bleak-hearted Orpheus was approaching, singing a song that would rend the heart of any listener just as the death of Eurydice had rent his own. They say the gods themselves wept for me. They say even rocks shed tears at the sound of my lyre, and the sorrowing trees cast their leaves to the ground even in the green days of summer. Of weeping rocks and grieving trees I will tell you nothing. There are many stories that are told about me. I do not confirm; I do not deny.

  Then one day a nymph appeared before me—a messenger from Zeus, surely, a shimmering golden beam of sunlight breaking through my darkness—and said, “You are so foolish, Orpheus, roaming about like this constantly singing your somber song. What good does such a song serve? The woman you loved is dead, yes. But you will not bring her back with a song like that.”

  I knew the part I was meant to play in this little colloquy. Dutifully I said, “What kind of song, then, should I sing?”

  “A song to soften the hearts of those who keep her now,” replied the nymph. “A song of the sort that only Orpheus can sing. Go to the Netherworld, Orpheus. Sing for Hades and his wife Persephone. Enchant them into restoring your bride. It is the only way. Strike your lyre, Orpheus! Plead for her return! Ask the gods of the Netherworld to relent, and they will! They will!”

  6

  The Netherworld has many gates, but the one that was best for my purpose was situated at Tainaron in the far southern Peloponnese, which is a back entrance to Tartarus close by the palace of King Hades and Queen Persephone, and that was where I made my descent. The preparation for the journey took me many days. One does not go lightly into the Netherworld. I fasted; I bathed; I sequestered myself in a house of fire and steam and sat by the heat un
til every pore of mine had opened. Then I went to the sacred grove of Persephone and dug a trench and sacrificed a young ram and a black ewe to the Queen of Hell, and their blood ran down into the earth and was received below. I felt the cold wind blowing upward toward me out of the kingdom of Hades and the gate opened for me.

  The road into Hades’ realm is a difficult one, a baffling circuitous path of innumerable branches and forks that leads down into that infinite pit, that great gulf that has neither bottom nor foundation. It is necessary for the souls of the newly dead to be accompanied by guides as they proceed to whatever last resting place awaits them. But the journey was familiar to me, for I knew that I had made it many times in cycles past, though this was, as ever, the first of them. Unerringly I chose the correct forks, and I swam the river of blood and the river of weeping, holding my lyre high above my head as I swam, and onward through that shadowy realm of the dead I went until I came to the shores of the Styx, which is a river that no one can cross unaided, for its black waters are poisonous; and I waited there beside the barren bank of that chilly stream until the grim ferryman, seeing what he took to be a newly arrived soul on the bank, came rowing toward me.

  “Take me across, Charon,” I said.

  He gave me a cold, cold look. Hell’s ferryman was a huge brawny man, uncouth and filthy, with matted hair and a coarse tangled beard. His body was powerful, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with great muscles that rippled and swelled with every stroke of his oar. He wore only a soiled, tattered rag about his loins and his eyes were as cold and hard as ice. “Who are you to come to Hell while breath still is in you?” he demanded, resting on his pole. “It is not given to those who live to enter here.”

  By way of reply I unslung my lyre and struck a gentle chord, and told him that so long as my dear one had been deprived of life I could no longer be said to be alive myself, for my heart was dead within me. Orpheus of Thrace am I, I said, the musician, the beloved of bright-shining Apollo, and I sang to him of the love of Orpheus for Eurydice, and of her cruel death and her husband’s grief, and from the way that I sang even that formidable ferryman could see at once that I was that very Orpheus. He knew then, for it was foretold as everything is foretold, why I had come, and his icy eyes clouded over, and the muscles of his jaws worked with turmoil and pain. For Charon is forbidden by the gods’ decree to ferry the living across the Styx and, knowing what I was about to ask of him, every fiber of his being was bristling with the desire to refuse my request. But he could not refuse. Zeus himself had sent a messenger to tell me to come here. Taking me across was forbidden, and yet he could not refuse. In the toils of that conflict the ferryman was hopelessly lost, and he stood before me irresolute, baffled, angry.

  I sang my songs and my singing began to melt through his bewilderment. I told him that Eurydice had been taken before her time—it was not true, of course, since nothing can ever happen before its time—and that I was here to plead with the gods of the Netherworld to release her to me. And as I saw his dour expression beginning to soften, my singing grew in fervor, until I was singing once again with the irresistible beauty that had been at my command before her death and which I had not been able to recover since that dark day.

  My playing worked its force upon him. The ferryman closed his eyes a moment and let his clenched muscles loosen their grip. Then he shrugged a shrug of resignation and beckoned me aboard his boat and rowed me quickly to the other bank.

  Cerberus, the three-headed dog that the monster Echidna spawned when she lay with the monster Typhon, was waiting for me there, crouching before the inner gate. He is a savage frightful thing, is Cerberus, all yellow fangs and writhing snaky hair, and it is a wonder that the spirits of the newly dead do not perish again with fright at their first sight of that awful hound. But it is not the task of Cerberus to rebuff the newly dead; it is living intruders like me whom he must guard against, and as I approached him his hackles rose and his jowls quivered and blazing spittle splashed from his three terrible mouths. From him came a ferocious growl, in truth three growls emerging from them together, each at a different clashing pitch so that they set up a sound most dire and harsh. But I had no fear of him. I played for him and sang to him and he paused in mid-growl, seemingly perplexed, and his great body, which had been tense and poised for a leap, slumped back in a posture of ease, and as I continued to sing his eyelids began to droop and he lowered one head and then another and then the third, and soon he lay with chins against the ground, sleeping as pleasantly as any happy puppy. I walked around him and went on my way.

  What else can I tell you of my journey toward the monarchs of the Netherworld?

  Beyond that gate I entered the Asphodel Fields, where those who in life were neither virtuous nor evil congregate and the souls of dead warriors twitter aimlessly like bats at sundown. With my lyre held before me I came to the ominous grove of black poplars, those joyless trees that signify the bleakness of this gloomy realm, which I had sung of often enough the way I had sung of love before I had ever known it. Onward from there I went to the lofty white cypress, Queen Persephone’s sacred tree, beneath whose spectral shade hordes of bloodless, nearly transparent ghosts gather to drink at the pool of forgetfulness before they are sent onward to their last dwelling-place. On the far side of it I came to the place of torment where the impious Ixion eternally pushes his heavy wheel in a circle and the vultures gnaw forever at the liver of that miserable giant Tityus and the ever-toiling Sisyphus fruitlessly rolls his huge stone uphill, only to see it tumble back again. All these, caught up in the strains of the melody I played, paused in their preoccupations to stare at me as I went past.

  I sang to them. Oh, did I sing!

  The bloodless ghosts wept as they heard me, and wheel-bound Ixion ceased his pushing, and Sisyphus too halted in his endless task to listen, and even Tityus’ vultures looked up from their bloody work to give me what must be, for vultures, a glance of compassion. The inexorable Furies themselves, those hideous crones with black bat-wings and bloodshot eyes and the heads of dogs, stopped their vengeful shrieking and came almost timidly up beside me to touch the hem of my robe. Tears were rolling down their shriveled cheeks.

  “Come with us,” these grim sisters said, and, gamboling ahead of me like a pack of cheerful schoolgirls, led me through the meadows until the gates of Hades’ royal palace rose before me.

  Queen Persephone herself received me. I was grateful for that, for softening the heart of her pitiless husband would have been a much harder task. But Persephone knows what it is like to be swept off into Tartarus in the prime of one’s youth, for she herself, the happy daughter of Demeter who brings fruitfulness to the fields, was carried away by stark Hades as she played in the green fields to be his queen in the infernal regions.

  “I am Orpheus,” I said. “You know why I am here.”

  “Yes. You seek your wife.”

  I gave her no chance then to tell me that I could not have her. I knew I had to reach her heart before she could utter any word of prohibition. Wielding my lyre as Zeus wields his thunderbolts, I wove a spell of song around the dark world’s queen. I sang her the song of the love of Orpheus and Eurydice and I sang her the song of the death of Eurydice and I sang her the song of my despair and my wanderings and the song of my hope of a reunion, and I implored her, in the name of that aspect of God that goes by the name of Love, to restore her to me, so that once again I could go through the world singing of love’s wonder and joy.

  I knew I had won my case. There had to be some shred of pity in her, queen of Hell though she was, and there was. Even if it had not been foretold, I would have known that my music had moved her, for I could see a flush come to her lovely cheeks, as though she were thinking of what her life had been like in her happy youth in the fields of Demeter before cold Hades had come for her in his black chariot.

  She said, because it was necessary for her to say it, “Orpheus, surely you must know that the dead may not leave here once they have come.�
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  “I know that. I ask you to make an exception, O Queen. I implore you: release her from your husband’s cold grasp.” And I struck my lyre again, quickly recapitulating the themes of each song, the song of love, the song of death, the song of mourning, the song of yearning for reunion with my beloved. “Her time will come again, for she is mortal, and Tartarus will have her once more,” I told her. “But she was taken too soon.”

  “You know that that is untrue.”

  “I do,” I admitted. “But I beg you to let me have her until she grows old. And then she will be yours again.”

  Sadly she shook her head, and said that that was impossible. But I could see from her eyes that our words were only a ritual, that in fact we were playing out a conversation that would end in her capitulation.

  “If you will not release her,” I said, “then I will not return from this place alone. And so you will have my death as well as hers.”

  But it is not my destiny ever to die, at least insofar as death is most commonly understood, and Queen Persephone knew that. With a little sighing sound she turned to one of her handmaidens and asked that Eurydice be brought forth; and shortly forth she came slowly forward out of that group of newly arrived spirits by the pool of forgetfulness beside the white cypress.

  She was limping a little, for the injury to her foot had not yet healed, and she was very pale, and her eyes, that had been so bright and clear, had the dull hopeless look of death in them. But I knew that she still had not tasted the waters of forgetfulness, for a look of shock and surprise came upon her face as she saw me, and she trembled and wept and came running in her limping way toward me and flung herself into my arms.