Cassandra

Much later I realised that a person’s attitude to pain reveals more about his future than almost any other sign I know.

But it occurs to me that I was noted for my endurance of pain. For my ability to hold my hand over the flame longer than anyone else, without grimacing, without crying.

We wanted to be like ourselves, inconsistent: that was the word Panthous tagged us with.

The last time I smiled was when Aeneas passed me headed toward Mount Ida with his handful of people, carrying his father, old Anchises, on his back. It did not matter that he failed to recognise me when he looked for me among the crowd of women captives. I saw he was getting away, and smiled.

There are secrets that ravage you, others that make you stronger.

My brother churned out lame, conventional bulletins about sun and rain, good and bad harvests, the breeding of livestock and children. How differently I would have spoken! I would have laid down the law in quite a different tone; I would have liked to teach them something quite, quite different, those unsuspecting, easily satisfied people – namely … Namely? What would I have taught them then? Panthous, who kept an eye on me in those days, asked me the question point-blank. What else would I have talked about besides weather, the fertility of the soil, cattle pests, diseases. Did I want to tear the people out of their familiar round where they felt comfortable and looked for nothing else? To which I arrogantly replied: ‘Because they don’t know anything else. Because this sort of question is all they are allowed.’

‘All they are allowed by whom? The gods? Circumstances? The king? And who are you to force other questions on them?

Helenus was no seer. He did not have the gift, he needed the ritual.

All this, the Troy of my childhood, no longer exists except inside my head. I will rebuild it there while I still have time, I will not forget a single stone, a single incidence of light, a single laugh, a single cry. It shall be kept faithfully inside me, however short the time may be.

The course of the god’s year and the demands of the palace determined my life. You could also say they weighed it down.

I thought, to be grown up consists in this game: to lose oneself.