Free Ithaca by Patrick Dillon Page A

. .” He lifts one withered hand. “Awe. Resentment. Love. We spend so much of our time trying to be different from them—”
    â€œI don’t know what he’s like,” I interrupt. “I don’t know how to be different.”
    â€œA fair point.” Nestor’s chin sinks to his chest. He seems weary, suddenly. “What have you been told about Odysseus?”
    â€œWhat the storytellers say.”
    â€œThere’s truth of a kind in stories. Our greatest hero. A fighter. A strategist. All true.” He pauses, his voice fading. “But not the whole truth, of course.”
    â€œSomeone told me he was a liar.”
    For a moment I can hear the swallows shrieking outside the window. The old man slowly shifts himself on his seat, like he’s looking for a comfortable position and not finding it.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œMentes, a friend of his from Africa.”
    â€œMentes? The African? I heard he died. But listen . . .” Nestor looks closely at me with a pained expression on his withered face. “There is no whole truth about a person. People are too complicated, they have too many sides . . . I will tell you the trouble with Odysseus. Your father was eloquent—a talker—and people distrust talkers. They distrust words, and Odysseuswas a master of words. A liar? Yes, some people called him that. I prefer to call him a storyteller, a spinner of yarns. That was how we survived eight years of hell . . . yes, hell . Can you imagine what the war was really like? Forget the storytellers. Agamemnon was no leader. Our best soldier, Achilles, refused to fight, and the rest of our men were no match for the Trojans. Odysseus kept us going, because he always had another idea, another tale that would save us all, a god who would come to our rescue, a spy who promised to open the gates for us. Scheme after scheme . . . Lies? Most of them, yes, but he believed them before we did.
    â€œThat mad scheme of the horse . . . there was only one chance in a thousand it would succeed . . . It was Odysseus’s plan, of course—who else could have come up with it? We went along with it because to hear Odysseus speak, to see him in the assembly, you would feel all objections fall away. That was Odysseus’s genius: people believed him.” Nestor shakes his head. “While they were with him. Afterward, of course, the doubts crept in . . . ‘Was that really true?’ Your father was a complex man. Not everyone liked him. Not many trusted him. Brave? Yes, when he’d convinced himself of some harebrained scheme. At other times a coward for whom the rest of us had to cover up.” He sighs. “I’m assuming that, as his son, you’re no fool yourself, which is why I am talking to you as if you were a grown man, not a boy of sixteen who has never learned to fight.”
    Nestor falls silent. Questions crowd into my mind—a lifetime of questions. But one look at the old man’s face stops me from asking them. Nestor is too exhausted to trouble with more questions.
    â€œWhy do you want to find him?” he asks after a pause.
    â€œFor my mother’s sake.”
    â€œNow I think you are lying.”
    â€œFor mine, then.”
    â€œAnd what will you do if you learn nothing?”
    â€œDeclare him dead, raise a funeral pyre, and let my mother marry again.”
    â€œThe best thing, perhaps. But whatever happens, it won’t be easy. Listen to me, Telemachus. Don’t judge your father too harshly. Odysseus was just a man. Better than some, no worse than others.” He lifts one finger. It has a chief’s ruby ring on it. “And here is another piece of advice. Don’t set too much store by finding Odysseus. You think that finding your father will explain everything about you. It won’t. I barely knew my own father. Hercules killed him . . . and later, Hercules became my friend. It’s a strange world. I’m one