Memoirs of a Bitch by Francesca Petrizzo, Silvester Mazzarella

descending through the trees and moving away toward the Eurotas? Till that morning I too had dwelled among the misty regions of death, barely lit by occasional lightning flashes. But then I had seen Paris, and life had recovered its value. The living cannot spend long periods with death. In the end, we have to choose.
    I had not expected to hear anyone behind me, but was not surprised. A steady step and a calm voice, “Helen.”
    I turned. I had no mask to hide behind now, only the dress I myself had chosen. Paris from Troy was smiling. He was not wearing a sword, only a short cloak that he took off in a single elegant sweep and laid on the ground. I would not be at the banquet that evening.

21
    How strange were my flesh and skin, how strange the blood in my veins. How strange my muscles melting like snow at the slightest touch from Paris, how strange that my nerves were at rest when I was with him, how strange that my mind was either totally absent or drowsing in suspended time that he controlled. The time of Paris. The most vivid time of my life. A few days that carried my dreams and hopes to their highest point. Before a gradual decline.
    Together. Every night and every day. Paris put off his departure, fascinating and entertaining the king, radiating charm like a fan or wrapping it around everyone like a veil. At the banquets he was a god in my eyes. Even then he was already using the slave girls after supper,but I ignored that, because it was only to fool Menelaus, to stop him suspecting anything. When Paris came to find me in the garden or in my rooms, I was the only one who mattered. I worked through all my clothes and asked for more. Four months he stayed in the palace at Sparta, and every day had a new dress to tear off me with his teeth, every day a new jewel to knock on to the marble floor during our violent love-making. Love was a word Achilles had never used, but Paris spread it about liberally like the petals of ceremonial flowers, making it blossom when he murmured it in my ear, yelling it at the empty countryside when we galloped across the river.
    Menelaus saw nothing, or pretended obstinately to see nothing, paralyzed in his ineptitude, stifled by his fear of Troy, perhaps even hoping that now at last I might conceive the son his sterile loins had failed to father. The time of Paris was nearly over; I could read that in the rapidly changing weather as it hastened toward the end of the navigation season, and in the impatient step of Amphitryon, the Trojan ambassador, as he diffidently passed down the corridors with his crested helm under his arm, determined always to do the right thing. I knew he had persuaded Paris that they must leave; Paris, my poor child of a lover that I thought perfect, my poor sweetheart of counterfeit gold. But I paid no attention, snatching the hours from the gods’ hands with thedesperate hunger of a nine years’ fast, and emptying the chests to cover myself with purple and pearls so Paris could have a new Helen every day and never tire of me. A Helen silently cutting herself off from her ghosts in the silvery whirlpool of his laugh, in the flame of his foreign touch, further and further from where her true image lay forgotten in the depths of the mirror. Helen, Helen, where are you going? What did you not know, what did you not understand? Like Hermione, I now had the memory of a fish. I could no longer remember what I had had or what I should do. What final reckoning would destiny expect me to pay?
    Then a ship with black sails came and brought me hope. Messengers rode in through the courtyard gate crying out their grief to the unresponsive Peloponnese. A king had died.
    Menelaus had to go. What else could he have done? Forget our long friendship with Crete, ignore all that mourning? And the splendid presents the Cretan king had sent him only a few months before …
    My lips devoured the body of Menelaus with a passion they had never felt. While he groaned and