Free Memoirs of a Bitch by Francesca Petrizzo, Silvester Mazzarella Page A

inconvenient emptiness, an easy excuse for annoyance. I ate and slept alone, and only my women slaves came near me. There was no point in doing my hair or caring how I dressed, and I very soon degenerated again into the tired slattern Achilles had found.
    I tried to work off my rage in long runs over the arid fields and exhausting swims in the cold waters of the Eurotas, though it didn’t help. I had one slave girl who knew how to ride a horse, and in her company I was able to while away whole afternoons of otherwise unbearable tedium.
    Menelaus knew nothing of these expeditions, nor would he have cared, since I was now nothing more than the woman he still visited regularly twice a month with the sole purpose of conceiving a son. And so I would go riding, bribing the grooms with gold and jewelry, and calling at poverty-stricken hovels in the foothills of the Peloponnese, where I mingled with shepherds and peasants and women worn down by constant childbearing and hard work. They would offer me water and ask for nothing back. The gods they prayed to had no relation to the gods venerated in the temples. If I had been born like them, I would have died after an anonymous life of exhausting labor and been buried close to the door of my home. They had never expected anything else. It was the only destiny open to them. They had read it in theirmothers’ wrinkles and sucked it in with their milk, accepting their destiny just as they accepted their own blood. But for me it had been otherwise. I had had the chance to live a different life, but it had been snatched out of my hands. Of course I was only flesh, bones and skin just like them, but I was also full of regret for what had so nearly happened for me. No, the only way I could have found peace would have been to burn myself out, reconciling myself to the death in life of so many other women like myself, wives of courtiers or captains, invisible women who at thirty years of age were already weaving their own shrouds behind closed doors. But that was not for me. So I forced myself to run till I was breathless, to swim furiously till I was at the point of collapse, and to try to forget in sleep the emptiness of my life. Weaving and burning the earth under my feet.
    Hermione got bigger and came to think of her wet nurse as her mother. It was too late for me to do much about this, and in any case I had never wanted to have children. My body, if a little softer than before, regained its slender perfection. But Menelaus’s love for me never returned. He continued to pay me visits, more and more often drunk, his breath smelling of wine and his clothes saturated with the cheap perfumes of other women. I had never loved him, but we had respected one another, and now he was insulting me. When he rolled over onhis back snoring with satisfaction, I felt myself little more than a tavern tart, the sort who cost little and are quickly worn out. And no one seemed to remember any longer that I was the queen. All Menelaus wanted was a male heir, and when he had that, even these visits would end. My two rooms, my garden and the desolate countryside beyond the river were my world. Though I still had my ghost walking at my side and lingering silently in dark corners. A presence too real for me ever to feel really alone. Of course I had more than many women had. But never enough to satisfy my fiery spirit.
    Menelaus was on top of me, an indistinct bristly shape, grunting like an exhausted wild boar until, with a final spasm, he soiled my thighs. Then as always he went on lying on the bed while I pulled the sheet around myself and turned to the wall. Waiting for him to go away. It had been a bad day, rain surprising me while I was swimming, violent whirlpools grabbing me so that I strained my muscles struggling to reach the bank.
    I had been resting my aching legs on the soft mattress when Menelaus came reeling up to the bed. I had heard the familiar slamming of the door against the wall. There