A Year in the World (33 page)

The mountains look on Marathon

And Marathon looks on the sea

And dreaming there an hour alone

I thought that Greece might still be free.

All his dissolute life behind him, the poet drowned swimming the straits at Missolonghi while fighting with his life and his fortune for Greece’s freedom. A dreamer who plunged into action. That I liked.

The professor had spent time on Corfu, which he pronounced
Corfee
. When I later read Lawrence Durrell, it was the professor’s face that I superimposed on the author’s. I was someone very young who never had been anywhere, except for a few twirls around the South, once to New York, and once for three days to Pennsylvania to retrace the Confederates’ bloody battle at Gettysburg.
Never forget, never
, my mother said. Professor Hunter was something so very special, a
classicist
. The word spun in my mind. I wanted that world in my voice, in my eyes. I wanted his wisdom and a sense of beauty. I fixated too on his big tanned hands and crisp shirts. In the tiny classroom, where the six other students seemed actually interested in the texts, I dreamed of Greek light. I wrote verses from the plays on index cards and kept them with me to memorize. I charged the terra-cotta–bound, boxed edition of the Greek plays, volumes of poetry, and ancient histories to my bookstore account, causing a nasty letter to arrive from my grandfather, which ended, “Get your head out of the clouds. Now.” If only he’d known that I wove garlands of laurel and wildflowers and left them at night on the professor’s office doorknob. That I waited in the rose garden under the full moon, hoping he’d stroll by. Now I should say how mortifying memory can be, but instead I’m happy to have slipped anonymous poems, the edges of the paper burned, under his door, to have been called “our Maenad.” Me, editor of the yearbook at Fitzgerald High School, referred to as a member of the ecstatic Bacchic chorus.
Corfeeeee,
the professor intoned. He remembered the Aegean wind, falling asleep in a small boat. I imagined my sunburned lips on his warm back. But I loved as well the chiseled cadences of Aeschylus (he said
Ice-q-loss
), and the sensuous whimsy of Sappho, and the reverberating phrases
the house of Thebes, the Argive host, on ye Bacchae
. The basement classroom floated in a classical sea. I rocked in that sea as if in the small boat. Exiting was a shock—into the late autumn Virginia day, the ginkgo trees a riot of yellow.

We disembark at Corfeeeee, and the boat crowd moves in a lumpen mass toward town. Hoping to circumvent the group and see something on our own, Ed and I immediately take a taxi to our farthest point, the seventeenth-century monastery of Vlahérna. We need not have bothered because busloads of other tourists are already there. Looking down, we see the monastery, pure and white, on its own tiny island ringed by boats. Pondikoníssi, another small island, greener, lies beyond. According to local legend, the island formed when Poseidon turned Odysseus’s ship to stone. The walkway to the monastery might sink under its load of visitors. We jump in another taxi and drive back to the old town. Corfu looks Italian. I knew of the Neapolitan and more profoundly influential Venetian dominations, but did not expect the extent of that heritage. The colors are those of Italy: sun-warmed peach, ripe mango, lemon, darkened apricot, and cream. I feel instantly at home among balconies dripping vines, arcades along a plaza, and tiny piazzas ringed with houses where the inhabitants can smell the lamb the neighbors are roasting. The town feels like a swatch of Venice.

Pulled into a small Orthodox church by the sound of a priest chanting, we are suddenly in a dim crowded space heavy with the smell of wax and incense, moving in a line toward a coffin, where people are leaning down to kiss the body. It is too late to exit. I’m crushed between the large rump of the man in front of me and the copious bosom of the woman behind. “It’s a saint,” Ed whispers, “not a corpse.” Soon we are leaning to kiss a robe, and the priest breathes in my face, “Spyridon.” He is dressed in about a hundred pounds of robes himself but does not sweat. He hands Ed a square of blue folded paper. Conveyed outside, we unwrap it and find a tiny scrap of the saint’s robe. Everyone coming out buys thin tallow candles like long pencils, lights them, and stands them in a tin box filled with sand. I do the same, saying to Ed, “Make a wish.” In an antique shop down the street, the owner tells us that half the men he knows are named for the saint who’d saved the island many times. We were lucky—Spyridon is only brought out four times a year. I had read about the saint in Durrell, never suspecting that someday I would keep a smidgen of his robe in my jewelry drawer.

At lunch I learn my first Greek working words—
mono nero
, only water, and the word for Greek salad, χωριάτικη, which I copy in my notebook. Ed is impressed that I can sound out all the Greek letters, a benefit of having been in a sorority. I learned to draw the chi (Χ) and omega (Ω) letters at five, when my older sister pledged at the University of Georgia. Being able to read the letters unlocks cognate words. But almost everything remains impenetrable. It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible. Is this one of the mysteries of travel? One returns to preverbal pointing, smiling, shaping the air with gestures.

This first day off the ship, I see how the trip will be. We may choose one dish from a whole menu, one sip from a great bottle of wine. One monastery, not ten. The sublime Byzantine icon museum, but not the Archaeology Museum. We’ll have a glimpse, a taste, a few impressions to memorize, and then we go back on board, flashing our ID cards, and sail on. As the ship pulls away from the dock, Corfu recedes, becoming a smear of gold; then the island is eclipsed by distance and disappears. I explore the rest of the island in my imagination: coves and beaches, a goat tethered to an olive tree, remote overgrown gardens, a dangling ripe tomato splitting in the sun, a decadent villa where an ancient woman writes her memoirs.

At sea, cocktail hour begins early, ends late, and reappears at unexpected times of the day. “Gentlemen hosts,” who probably retired from teaching or sales and finally get to go out to see the world, mix with the many single women and ask them to dance to “it’s cherry pink and apple blossom white . . . when you’re in love” and “Racing with the Moon,” and, oh no, the tinkly bars of “tea for two and two for tea.” This seems ludicrous at first, then tragic, then ludicrous. But from whose point of view? The women probably were married to men who danced only reluctantly. Now they can dance, rediscovering the tango and jitterbug from college days, and the hosts dance so well, unlike their husbands, who huffed at weddings and followed the box step. Not like the Florida boy I met early in my senior year of college. My roommate Saralynn and I stopped by a table in the student union where a bunch of ΣΑΕs were playing cards. Only Frank stood up. He and I both felt electricity between us. Later he told me he said to himself the moment we met that I was the girl he would marry. He knew how to dance with such ease and grace that we danced into marriage the summer after graduation, and eons later I have a recurrent dream of dancing with him.

The hosts look so professional, whereas there’s a way of dancing that exudes a sense of life. When I try to express this to Ed, he says, “You’re taking this a bit seriously. Let’s go in the casino and win a million dollars.” Ten quarters later we find the deliciously comfortable and empty movie theatre and watch two movies we missed when they first came around.

Crete
—I love the word. We board a bus for a land tour and head out of Agios Nikolaos toward Heraklion and Knossos. I am doused in number-fifty sunblock because when I stepped out on deck at seven
A.M.,
the sun felt like a branding iron. “You’re well acquainted with
A.D.,
I expect,” the guide announces. “Everything you’ll see today will all be
B.C.
” We turn into the grounds of the legendary Minoan ruins and pour off the bus into a steaming lot packed with other people streaming out of other heaving buses. Stained backpacks, water bottles, fat rear ends, pale flesh oozing out of tank tops, sweat, exhaust, belching, cameras—we herd into the beginnings of myth, the palace of King Minos.

In protest, the cicadas are shrieking, drowning out the voices of the guides. I’ve heard cicadas all my life; I never have heard them tune up to this break-the-sound-barrier decibel level. How spooky, as though a mad Greek chorus has been activated. The guide pauses at the snaking queue for the labyrinthine palace, then says that because of the crowds we won’t be seeing this, this, and that. She lingers before a row of terra-cotta pots and explains at length that their use is disputed. I try to focus on the fact that the pots are older than the oldest Etruscans. The wall behind them—painted with soot and bulls’ blood? But instead I’m remembering the myth of Talos, who was made of bronze. He heated himself until he glowed and almost turned molten, then stepped up to grab and embrace strangers as they arrived on the island. We are in his arms. The cicadas twang with a primitive, rhythmic cadence. The guide’s voice can’t reach beyond the third layer of people surrounding her. “Can you speak louder?” I ask. I’m anxious to hear everything about this place.

“Oh, no,” she responds, waving her hand toward the cicada-infested trees. “They’ll just screech louder.” So the latter-day chorus continues its commentary. I may turn molten. Everywhere the dusty caper plants sprawl. I pick a pod to take home to Bramasole. If I blow the seed through a straw into the crevice of a stone wall, it might sprout.

The
famous labyrinth never has been found. I am sure it existed and was not simply this intricate palace itself, as one of my books suggests. The labyrinth—one of our oldest stories. That it has been repeated through the centuries means that elements of the story strike lightning in the collective psyche. Theseus: lost in a maze, you are given by your lover a ball of white thread (the
mitos
), and you find your way out, having slain the dark force that pulled you in there. Daedalus: locked inside a labyrinth of your own creation, you therefore must escape by your own wits. The messages are clear enough.

Early in the myth, Poseidon gave a fabulous white bull to Minos, who was supposed to sacrifice it. He did not. He sacrificed a lesser bull. To punish Minos, Poseidon caused Minos’s wife, Pasiphaë, to become enamored of the white bull. She coaxed Daedalus to build a wooden cow, where she could hide and sexually encounter the bull. The product of that union was the half-bull, half-man, the Minotaur. This gets murky. Parts of the myth do not yield easy metaphorical meanings.

Instead of all the things we came to see, we see the oldest road in Europe, complete with side channels for drainage. Under the hooves of today’s herds, the white stones are getting about a hundred years of wear. I stand off to the side, fanning with a guidebook. This sun is a bull. I could be trampled by heat-incensed tourists. Ed looks stricken.
Alain, you are so right
. Mobs in heat. Lord.

We drive on to the museum in Heraklion, a further exercise in frustration. Here’s the fabulous Minoan collection, and I do see it—through the crook of an elbow, over a shoulder, and as someone steps on my feet. I imagine myself wearing blinders in order to see the pitted ivory acrobat at full stretch before executing a somersault off the bull’s back. This acrobatic bull leaping recurs in Minoan art and appears to connect with worship of the bull. Although some scholars find the feat an aerodynamic, physical impossibility, the representation makes the leap look quite plausible. One painting shows three figures, fore, on, and aft the bull. Two of the androgynous figures are white, the other is red, also probably painted with bull blood. While some consider color to reveal gender, maybe instead the figure in red, the one flipping over the bull, is transformed for the moment of sympathetic magic with the bull, and becomes white again when back on the ground. The art emits energy, as though these people still were among us.

Oddly, the galleries are hushed, only a faint hum like a faraway hive. In the afternoon’s intense heat we are Minoan zombies moving from room to room.

The bull symbol, heavily potent. This early bull mythology caused the powerful
corno
(horn) symbolism throughout the Mediterranean world—the crescent moon, the forefinger-pinkie sign which, when raised, is used to denote a cuckold, when pushed outward from the body to poke out the eyes of a witch, and when pointed at the ground assures that something will not happen here, to us.

In the back of the bus I’m trying to solve part of the old labyrinthine myth. The cryptic part is Pasiphaë, all fired up, creeping inside Daedalus’s wooden bull, positioning herself so she could mate with the bull her husband was supposed to have sacrificed but didn’t. The physical logistics are hard to picture. And how to read that myth? If a woman goes for the purely sexual, there’s hell to pay? Lust can drive you to far extremes? The oldest stories are usually illustrative, as are frescoes for the illiterate, those visual stories that show within the same frame a span of narrative time—the life of a saint from birth, including his miracles and death. Visual aids, teaching tools. The myth of the mating of Pasiphaë and the white bull stumps me. Surely there’s more to it than her scarlet ways or the punishment of Minos.

Much more appealing and understandable that careless exuberance of Icarus, who flew out of Knossos on wings of wax and feathers designed by his father, the ever-inventive Daedalus. A sun like today’s would surely melt his wings and send him plunging into the sea.

Myths must have grown out of the lives of actual humans. Some were elevated over time into gods; others, such as Icarus, remained touchingly human. Someone named Icarus once mysteriously disappeared from Knossos without a trace. A visitor trading oil or wine later reported a body washing up near a small island. The small curved scar on his forehead, the hand clutching a carved dowel, the clay pendant of a bull still around his neck—why, it must be that crazy boy, Icarus. He flew. His old man Daedalus was pushy, an entrepreneur whose social climbing almost did him in. He was always involved in some disaster. No wonder the king imprisoned him. The father-son story was told a thousand times, evolving them into myth. Daedalus flew on, after the death of his son, and landed in Sicily. If you’re smart enough, you escape.