An Iliad. Alessandro Baricco

until you would find yourself dying a miserable death.’ She frightened me, I told you. Old people, often, inspire fear. I held the shining white veil tight around my head and followed her. They were all looking down towards the plain. No one saw me. I went to Paris’s rooms and found him there. A woman who loved him had enabled him to enter Troy through a secret gate and had saved him.

      The old woman took a chair and placed it facing him. Then she told me to sit. I did. I couldn’t look him in the eyes, but I said to him, ‘So you escaped the battle. I wish you were dead, killed by that magnificent warrior who was my first husband. You who boasted you were the stronger … You should go back and challenge him again. But you know very well that it would be the end of you.’

      I remember that then Paris asked me not to hurt him with my cruel insults. He said to me that Menelaus had won that day, because the gods were on his side, but maybe the next time he would win, because he, too, had friends among the gods. And then he said to me: Come, let’s make love. He asked if I remembered the first time, on the island of Cranae, the day after he abducted me. And he said to me: Not even that day did I desire you as much as I desire you now. Then he rose and went to the bed. And I followed him.

      He was the man who in that moment everyone down on the plain was searching for. He was the man whom no one, neither Achaean nor Trojan, would have helped or hidden that day. He was the man they all hated, as the black goddess of death is hated.