Dinner with Persephone (16 page)

As I watch the television producing images that correspond to the ones already in the viewers’ experience, I realize that television is a technological extension of the mirror—every time I turn on a Greek program, with its different manners and inflections, symbols and conventions, it is like looking into a mirror and seeing not myself but a complete unsuspected world of other beings, like having dreams that belong to someone else’s life. I have been thinking about mirrors, second-century mirrors and twentieth-century mirrors. Artemidorus’s second-century clients dreamed of them, and so do the twentieth-century dreamers in my
oneirokrites.
The difference is in what they expect to see in the mirrors. The twentieth-century mirrors show unexpected reflections, images of other people, or of animals, or of landscapes, worlds within faces—our mirrors have been tutored by surrealist painters. The twentieth-century mirrors are themselves unstable; the dreamer may be looking for his reflection in a shattered mirror, something the second-century dreamers don’t seem to do. Artemidorus’s mirrors are more obedient and static, as are the faces of his dreamers, which seem to remain their own, although their reflections can be distorted, or can seem uglier than they really are. “Standing in front of a mirror and seeing one’s reflection in the glass as it actually is means good luck,” he writes, but I suspect him here of one of the flashes of deadpan irony I think I recognize in him. A philosopher of dreams, above all, knows that no mirror shows us as we are, since, like Snow White’s stepmother, we never look into them without a wish. We can only hope to catch a partial glimpse of our true reflections in the responsive expressions on another person’s face, and only then on the condition that we recognize that another person’s face is not a mirror.

I pick up my dry cleaning before I go downtown for a haircut—I have had to change cleaners because the man whose shop I had
been using asked persistently for a date with me, although he displayed on his wall not only a picture of General Plastiras, a prominent Greek military figure and politician of the twenties, but a color shot of his wife and two little girls. I asked him the last time to tell me the names of his wife and children, but his campaign carried on, and although there are certain kinds of men I find irresistible, my temptations don’t include married Greek dry cleaners. But the price of virtue is as always a high price—the white-haired dry cleaner I chose because he looked safely decrepit through his front window is charging me significantly higher rates.

I try to flag down a taxi to take me downtown for my haircut, but the driver throws his head back like a horse refusing a bit, rolls his eyes, and clicks his tongue against his front teeth. It is the wordless no the Greeks share with the Turks—he is not going in my direction. The Athenian taxi system is, I think in some moods, one of the great arguments against the city. You can only get your ride if it fits the driver’s preference, and this involves you in shouting out your destination as he drives by, something you may not want all the world to hear. It is a terrible system for the discreet, the shy, or anyone sensitive to rejection. Still, I find a consenting driver, and am on time for my appointment with O Kyrios Emmanuel, as the master hairdresser is reverently called by his staff.

The retention of the “Kyrios” and the formal definite article O has a certain drama in an environment where the title is usually so quickly dropped, and where newspapers and magazines routinely call former prime minister Papandreou “Andreas.” O Kyrios Emmanuel is artistic, “as a gift of nature, since I am from Alexandria,” he tells me, “and like many children of the city chosen by Alexander, I am a very old soul, both artistic and not easily impressed. I think I am now on my last incarnation, there is so little I have not seen. You, I think, must be a very young soul, in your first incarnation—I can tell by the way your eyes light up with joyful surprise at each new thing you hear, like a newborn who cannot believe the world is so beautiful.” I resign myself to the fact that O
Kyrios Emmanuel has decided to give me a metaphysical haircut. I had been thinking this morning about mirrors, and now I am one. It may be that O Kyrios Emmanuel helplessly possesses the kind of brutal sentimentality that runs from antiquity through Christianity, that sees a face that shows its suffering as a wise face, probably a good face. But it is also true that wisdom is not only won through an appetite for suffering. O Kyrios Emmanuel believes I am transparent in the way an icon is—I may have seen people so corrupt that their lives could best be described as decompositions; it may be that I don’t choose to make my face a theater of pain; I may have fought as hard as a guerrilla soldier to keep a route to joyfulness open in my face—but for O Kyrios Emmanuel, I am a looking glass, in which he sees the image of his own honed judgment and the ancient wisdom he has acquired.

While he is cutting my hair, O Kyrios Emmanuel gives me a portfolio to leaf through, of newly developed photographs he took on his summer vacation at Monemvasia, a famously picturesque town of the Peloponnesus, restored under the patronage of millionaires. They are elegant, a boat with a geometrized Mondrian-like reflection of itself in the water, a crashingly romantic shot of waves breaking over the rocks, but they are inane—Greece is often too beautiful to be a good subject for the cameras of amateur photographers, who capture its beauty only as decor, and miss what makes the best still photographs, the sense that they are moments out of a continuing story. O Kyrios Emmanuel tells me he is taking
zembekiko
lessons, learning the famous Greek dance you see mostly men dancing, with dramatic improvised solos. “We didn’t do this so much in Alexandria,” he says, “we had more of the
tsifteteli
,” the belly dance the Greeks took up from the Turks, whose arm movements are the signal of a dance in an erotic mood, even among teenagers at discos. I ask him to tell me about Alexandria, which lost the last mass of its Greek population in the 1960s, when Nasser set out to ensure that it would be Egyptians who profited from Egypt’s resources. “Perhaps it takes an old soul to feel it, but there you can feel the presence of Alexander as nowhere else,
not even in Macedonia, which after all was only the country of his boyhood, not of his manhood. But Alexandria was a city that came to him in a dream, when he was given the omen that he had chosen the right site, through certain verses of Homer’s that were quoted by a white-haired man in the dream. And it was in Egypt that it was confirmed that Alexander was a god and the true son of Zeus. Oh, yes, there are proofs of it in his life story. You know, for instance, about the sign that occurred just before Alexander fought the Persian king Darius at the battle of Gaugamela? Alexander was addressing the troops, and inspiring them to victory over the barbarians. He raised his right hand and prayed that if he were the true son of Zeus the Greeks should be protected and should win this battle. There had been some debate about the right moment to attack the enemy, but at that instant an eagle, the bird of Zeus, flew down and hovered over Alexander’s head, then the bird itself led the Greek troops into the battle, which they won. You don’t believe this? There were eyewitnesses.” It is the first time that I have been told a story out of Plutarch while my hair is being blow-dried. He seems a person who would enjoy the small erudition of knowing the source, so I guess, since he hasn’t mentioned it, that he may not know it is from Plutarch—or that it is a story.

When I pay the bill, I discover that I am ten dollars short. So far, it seems that all bills in Greece are paid in cash. I go to the bank to get cash for my rent, I pay utilities at either the post office or their headquarters in cash. Checks seem not to be accepted, and my landlady tells me, although I can’t verify it, that it is actually illegal to send a check in payment through the mail. I tell O Kyrios Emmanuel that I will go to the bank for the extra cash, because I will be away for the month, but he waves me out airily, saying, “Bring the money whenever you remember it.”

I stop on the way to the airport at one of the Alpha-Beta supermarkets, grand-scale food palaces with products imported from all over Europe that are said to have revolutionized the Greek diet, a mark of Greece’s membership in the EEC. I want to buy a particular
brand of Swiss chocolate for Kostas’s parents, who can find it easily in Thessaloniki, but not on the island of Thasos. Though the selection is luxurious, there is still a core of the foods that declare you are on Greek territory—olives, feta,
loukaniko
sausage, octopus, fresh capers, stuffed vine leaves,
pastourma
, the cured meat that in Turkey is still made with camel, tahini, the special Greek pastas,
manestra, kritharaki, trakhana.
As I am getting into the car with my purchases, I see a sign with the market’s slogan, “
kai tou pouliou to gala
,” a proverbial Greek phrase for recherché luxury, “there is even bird’s milk,” that dates back at least to the poet Menander, who wrote of Samos, a famously fertile island, that life was so abundant there that even the birds gave milk.

At the airline terminal, a sign at the check-in counter tells passengers: “Macedonia is Greek and has been for centuries. Read history.” Tape-recorded bells announce the departure of flights for Rhodes, Kefallonia, Crete, Zakinthos, like a choice of dreams. But I board the plane for Kavalla, decorated inside with a bestiary of fish with wings, and fly over the Saronic Gulf at sunset, the water like blue space beneath me, into blue space above me. I pass the flight reading a men’s magazine with the young Marlon Brando on the cover, a kind of equivalent of
Esquire
, which presents itself with self-assured virility, and has had various staff members in and out of the government, I am told. This is one of the less considered consequences, maybe, of living in a small country—the web is very tight, and the relations between press and business and government almost inevitably more close-knit. I turn to the cover article on the Greek man and his mother, which leads off with macabre double-page color spreads of well-known TV and show business personalities and their mothers. Four plump, sixtyish mothers are pictured punishing their fortyish sons, pulling the men’s hair and boxing their ears. One is shown pretending to diaper her muscular son, his hairy belly dramatized by the white cloth, and the outlines of his adult testicles visible through his diapers. In another spread, a hefty comedian with a heavy beard and dark-ringed, exhausted eyes is
sprawled across the lap of his mother, who wears a ladylike shirtwaist dress and carefully waved gray hair, as she lifts her hand to spank his half-bared buttocks. Each of the mothers describes the high points of her childbirth and describes what her son means to her. “He is all. He is everything,” says one; “He is more than everything,” says another, “he is above my life.”

The feature continues with a questionnaire which matches a man with the movie archetype of the Greek mother that fits him best. There are, it seems, more movie archetypes of Greek mothers than of Greek wives, and it is surprising to see how developed this mythology of the mother is. You choose from the questionnaire alternate responses by your mother to a variety of situations, in themselves an amusing partial guide to the fantasy lives of Greek men. What kind of house do you live in with your mother, what kind of father do you have, what pet name do you like her to call you (“my darling golden one,” “my boy,” “my pasha”), what profession does your mother want you to take up, what kind of wife does she want for you, how does she behave toward your girlfriends, how does she act when you enter your obligatory military service (“She kisses me, makes the sign of the cross over me, and says to me: ‘Keep three women always in your mind, my son—the All-Holy Virgin, Greece, and your mother!’ ”), when you go to war with the Turks, when you conquer Constantinople and become involved with a Turkish girl. Among the possible responses to this scenario: one mother curses her son; another says, “A Turkish girl, of all things! Is she at least Christian?” and a third says with considerable schadenfreude, “What should I say, my pasha? & You are a man, now make her understand that, the Turkish bitch!”

The five movie archetypes are as local in flavor as farm produce. They hone my sense of the profound effect of being surrounded by icons from childhood on, images with strictly prescribed poses and costumes that classify and stabilize, a taxonomy of the sacred. Like icons, these images of women are caught between power and incapacity, the inanimate and the superhuman.
One is a plump, impeccably bourgeois lady in a hat, who interferes in her son’s personal and professional life, and dominates him by mercilessly feeding him, putting herself beyond suspicion of mixed motives by always having a favorite dish on hand to stifle his protests. The second is a cat-eyed, hawk-nosed woman with a cruel glamour, the sadistic mother, who bullies and slaps her son capriciously, and tries to drive away his girlfriends by paying them off. The third choice is a woman self-absorbed to the point of madness, who sees her child more as a character in an ongoing story she is acting out. Four is a terrifyingly hatchet-faced woman, with a twisted bitter mouth, who shouts “you anathematized one” when she wants her son to do chores, and teaches him from childhood that life is hellish and stony and that he has to face it as brutally as it faces him. This fantasy mother curses her son, brandishing a knife, when he moves out, and when she meets his girlfriend, threatens to kill herself if he marries that slut. The final choice is the sentimental favorite, the
laiki
mother, the mother of the son of the people, her pride and the pride of the village, who is good-hearted, ignorant, “poor like our poor country Greece,” who taught her boy to be “a good Christian, good man, and good Greek,” knowing nothing beyond the world of custom and common sense that shaped her, “the unfortunate one,” an object both of tenderness and condescension.

When I next have the courage to look out the window again, we seem to be flying straight into the sea for landing. We fly directly over a boat, then some marshy patches of land floating in the water like carnival masks, and drop onto a runway, land abruptly substituted for water.