I can sense the stillness and restlessness
and you may well be right,
for my tapestry is nearly finished.
[PENELOPE exits.
PETROCULOS speaks his thoughts.]
PETROCULOS: [to himself] Penelope, you are smelling the bait for
your trap.
Soon you will come into it
and I will spring it shut on you.
We will marry. You will have no choice.
I will stir the hearts of the other men.
I will stir their doubts and I will enrage them
over you tricking them with the tapestry.
You will be forced to choose
or be conquered by all of us.
Penelope, you will marry me.
I will have to put Agathy to death
for his improper sexual advances towards you.
The other suitors will leave Ithaca,
and I will send you to my home
as a gift to my family—as a servant.
At some time in the future,
you and your poetic son
will join Ulysses on the sea.
We will find your drowned bodies.
I will grieve for this loss of you, my wife,
and the loss of Telemachus,
since the world will believe I loved him,
as the son I never had.
I will gain Ithaca and the regions around for trade
and I will be a most respected
and reverenced senior leader,
one who will not be questioned
when others leave me to the personal tragedy
of losing my wife.
As for Ulysses, if he does come back
he will have to face Penelope’s betrayal,
the loss of his son, and my army
will quickly put the spear of departure to his heels.
What a catastrophe!
Three wasted lives!
But the three deaths will make my life permanent
in privileges and wealth.
I will be powerful, respected, and admired.
The world will say, “Look at noble Petroculos.
He has lost so much.
Life has been unkind to him
and yet he continues to conduct himself
with human integrity
and the actions of a selfless man
in the service of his country.”
Act VI
Telemachus
Colours of Twilight
[TELEMACHUS is a young man, about twenty-five, tall and graceful. He has his mother’s auburn hair and light skin, with piercing blue eyes. He is soft spoken and gives the appearance of being thoughtful and learned in the arts of music, poetry, and philosophy. He enters his mother’s chambers: the secret room, which the suitors have not seen, the chambers that belong to Penelope and Ulysses with the tree and the carvings. PENELOPE is at her tapestry. TELEMACHUS enters.]
TELEMACHUS: Mother, how can you stay at that tapestry
when there is so much uncertainty in our lives?
PENELOPE: Life is certain. Death is certain.
It is the ways of man
and the way he conducts himself
that bring about uncertainty, not only to his life
but to all other lives around him.
It is man who brings uncertainty
with his conquest and domination,
the controlling and confinement
of all other lives around him.
How do you dispense uncertainty?
You think, you organise.
You plan and you act in the face of uncertainty.
You affirm life, my son.
Say yes to life.
The uncertainty that you speak about
becomes a cancer that destroys
the passion and affirmation in a man.
TELEMACHUS: What do you want me to do?
All these years you have been preoccupied
with these threads that you put in during the day
and undo at night.
I have seen you embroider my father’s ship
on the canvas during the day
only to see you undo it at night.
PENELOPE: I sail with him at night,
and during the day I hide him from others.
TELEMACHUS: I do not know what to do.
I fear to act and I fear not to act.
Whichever way I decide
will bring turmoil and further uncertainty.
PENELOPE: These past ten years it is this tapestry
and my desire to do the right thing for my lost husband,
for your shipwrecked father,
that has given us more time.
as a woman of the law
and that is why those out there
have not broken the law with violence or murder.
TELEMACHUS: But they will break the law!
We do not have much time.
The hunters have thrown the net
of our captivity.
You have managed to find something
within the law
that has given us more time,
but not anymore.
We have run out of threads,
and the men outside
are coiling and coiling
the black thread of our fate
around and around our ankles,
and they will pull and pull
until we fall.
Our time is running out.
PENELOPE: I sense it too.
I see the net of our captivity becoming tighter;
our world is getting smaller.
TELEMACHUS: I know you cannot agree to marry any of them.
They are wolves, wild dogs, and jackals.
They all want to steal what belongs to Ulysses.
Those men out there want to hunt and kill you.
They haven’t driven you insane,
or maybe that will be the last lie
that they invent about you, mother—
that you have gone insane
with your longing and grief for my father,
and therefore they had to take over our region.
PENELOPE: They will not declare me mad
because they want to show to the world
that they have married a sane woman.
They want me sane.
As Agamemnon wanted the cunning intellect of your father,
these men want my intellect and prestige.
They will not declare me mad.
I am their prize.
TELEMACHUS: They will kill you after they have wed you.
PENELOPE: I will not wed any of them.
It has never been a moral right,
or a right within the law, that they be here.
TELEMACHUS: Mother, beloved mother. They are pulling in the nets!
PENELOPE: My son you must leave.
TELEMACHUS: Leave without you?
The one who has kept me alive and sane all these years?
The one who has planned and plotted
against the armies of conquerors
with only your determination
and those cursed and blessed threads.
I could never leave you!
PENELOPE: You must leave.
You must harden your heart
and abandon me to my fate.
TELEMACHUS: I will not do this,
not even for
you, mother.
I love you, and I will not abandon you
in the crisis of our lives.
I do not have this metal will or stone heart.
What you ask me to do
takes a different kind of ruthless courage.
I do not have such courage.
I am caught mother,
like a freshly caught creature.
And all the tensions of uncertainty
pull like hooks in my chest.
I am caught and I cannot act,
for whatever way I act
it will bring betrayal and death.
Tell me, mother,
was my father a great warrior?
PENELOPE: Yes, he was,
and he taught me the skill of the sword
to protect you or him in such a critical time.
Yes, your father was such a man who would strike,
and yes he was stained with other men’s blood.
TELEMACHUS: I love my father,
but I do not have his heart
to pick up a sword and fight.
I question and seek what is hidden from me.
I am continually in the quest
to find the missing parts of me in the hidden.
My actions are uncertain
because my heart loves
and cannot take the life of another.
All my actions suffer from this sadness in my heart.
And therefore I miss my target.
but I missed my target, Mother.
PENELOPE: You will leave and you will leave tonight.
TELEMACHUS: If I left, you will be killed
by whoever you choose.
If I stay, we both will be killed.
I will probably be the sacrifice on your wedding.
My blood will stain your marriage bed.
I can’t leave you alone in this crisis,
and at the same time I cannot protect you.
I have thought about this, Mother.
I have spent many nights awake,
soaking in my sweat at our fate and final outcome.
I cannot leave you.
PENELOPE: Go and search for your father.
If I am to die at the hands of either the wolf or jackal,
I would rather die knowing
that you have escaped their nets.
Your father did not have a choice.
Either he went or all of us would have been killed.
You must learn to depend on your intuition,
your intellect, and your blood affirmation.
My son, my son.
You will leave and you will leave tonight.
I am begging you. [drops to her knees]
I am on my knees. Save yourself.
You are all truth and beauty to me.
Save this seed in you
and leave me to my choices and fate.
TELEMACHUS: No, no, no! I will not leave!
And as the blade falls,
I will see my father and you welcoming me home.
[They hold each other and weep.]
PENELOPE: It has come to this.
I plead with you, my son.
You can only save me by saving yourself.
You must leave and find your father and his men.
You must organise to take back
what these men seem to have made their own,
because they have found a back door in the law.
TELEMACHUS: I have thought many times
to cut them with my sword while they slept:
one by one, the young, and the old.
When I pick up my father’s sword,
such a weight and burden comes upon my soul,
and I freeze. Mother, I freeze—
not with fear or doubt
but with the knowledge that this blade
has gutted and disembowelled the lives of other men.
And yet . . . although I realise
that I would be in the right to kill them in their sleep,
I do not have the might to spill another man’s blood
into the thirsty earth.
And I well realise
that I cannot kill them while they are awake.
I do not have their training, age, or skill.
I question the structure of appearance
and the shifting and changing masks
of the taught things.
I question my place and role in all this disaster.
PENELOPE: Listen, I can hear noises outside.
Are they organising themselves?
I will give my answer to Petroculos,
to gain some more time while you escape.
TELEMACHUS: Do you mean to tell me
that you will marry this man?
He is a jackal.
I have watched him with the others.
He always speaks wisely and yet
seeks every opportunity to gain power for himself.
He has become friends with Agathy.
I have more than once seen them talking together.
I do not think they are speaking
about poetry or philosophy
and since they have nothing in common,
they are probably planning our fate together.
If you choose Petroculos, we are dead.
He will arrange an accident for us.
PENELOPE: I choose my husband Ulysses in life.
I choose Ulysses in death.
TELEMACHUS: Petroculos is planning something.
He is not going to wait anymore.
How did you manage to stay alive so long?
Have you never suffered fear?
PENELOPE: I suffer from the inquisition of my soul.
I suffer from fear of not being able to keep you alive.
This fear is with me all the time.
My desire is to keep you alive.
I do not fear these men’s betrayals.
They cannot remove what is mine or of me.
The worst thing a man can do in his life
is not to have lived it,
and you can only live your life by being in it,
facing all your struggles and fears,
and then—Telemachus—asking for more.
The deeper you get, the more you find of yourself.
The more you live in safety and security
—the world of mediocrity—
the less you have of what gives meaning to life:
deep longing and deep love.
You listen to me: whatever happens here
—and expect the worst—
you will leave.
TELEMACHUS: I will not leave you here alone.
And yet you cannot come with me.
I am torn between you and my father,
and I cannot act.
I must wait and see what will happen.
PENELOPE: All victims of war wait
to see what will happen
and hope that they will be spared.
We will not be spared,
and we will not wait to see what will happen.
TELEMACHUS: I must wait for my father.
In the first ten years of his departure from our lives
I grieved and ached to see his face
and to feel his reassurance
that life will return him to us, to each other.
Life did not return him after ten years.
He did not return to us.
Instead we had a plague of men
who have sought the region and you.
And here have they stayed.
Now they are ready to claim illegally and legally
what they think is rightfully theirs.
I tell you, Mother, they will want blood for their wait.
The one you choose will want my blood and later yours.
The others you did not choose will also seek blood.
I feel like a fly caught in the net of the spider.
PENELOPE: You are not a fly, you are a man,
and you are in your life
and therefore able to take the sword.
[Grasps and holds her son by his shirt.]
I love you, my son.
What will happen unless you act
is that you will be killed. And worse for me.
They will make me watch your death,
as they will make you watch
my humiliation and violation.
We are not going to sit here waiting for them to kill us.
Bring me my sword. It is time for war.
A wise man will not seek war,
but when it comes to him,
and all reason has vanished,
then it is time
to cut the destroyers of life with a hot blade.
I am not going to offer you as a sacrifice.
As for me, I will know life
in knowing you have escaped.
It is not your time to die.
This is not the time for you.
Now leave me, my son.
Head to the sea.
There will be a vessel waiting
to take you away from me and Ithaca.
[They embrace.]
TELEMACHUS: Is it true, what the masters say,
that “men’s souls are sinister and black
and the world will always burn with fire and weapons”?38
I am not leaving you, Mother.
I am not leaving. [kisses his mother]
PENELOPE: My beautiful son, we have hurt the world.
We have hurt you.
My beautiful son, I could not bear
to not see you for all eternity.
[They both embrace and weep
More noises are heard outside, men screaming, running, things breaking.]
PENELOPE: Bring my sword.
No one will touch you while I live.
Bring my sword.
Let me look outside.
[Both go to look outside.
The noises stop and there are only moans of pain.]
Act VII
The Return
Colours of Dawn
TELEMACHUS: Mother, mother!
I can see a beggar coming towards us.