Dinner with Persephone (40 page)

“This, my dear, is a punishment for the irresolvable problem of your sex’s fertility. You do this magnificent feat of giving birth, which we believed made you divine—but you persisted in giving birth to mortal children. With every divine youth you made a mortal death. So the old Easters, and springtime festivals, which used
pregnancy and childbirth as a symbol and a magic to secure immortality, were given a lesser status, a smaller role in the Christian Easter, which tries another route, abandoning the magic of female sexuality, pregnancy, for the magic of male sexuality, erection. Look at the image of the Anastasis, Christ upright in hell, which is pictured as a cave, an ancient and very particular, in polytheist worship, symbol of the female genitals, Christ lifting the supine from their coffins. And listen to the language of the feast,
anastasis
, standing again,
anastaino
, I rise again—it is even present in your own word, resurrection.”

Before I go home to pack for Corfu, I walk through the Athens of Megali Evdomada, the Great Week of Easter. I pass stray roses growing in old Mana olive oil tins, and the inevitable neighborhood religious supplies store, its windows full of silver-plated icons and tin votive plaques stamped with houses, babies, and clasped hands over the raised script of the message
I
BEG
YOU
. The uglier buildings are covered with great swaths of the willing Athenian wisteria and lilac, like unattractive women with perfect jewelry. The grand buildings—like the house of the eccentric Duchesse de Plaisance, the French philhellene who was said to have kept her daughter’s mummy preserved in her old room at home—all seem to be undergoing repairs at the same time. A giant delivery truck goes by; painted on its cab is a portrait of the Virgin Mary, whose face is framed with the word
Megalokhari
, “great in grace.” Between the railings of the National Garden, planted by Queen Amalia as the first queen of independent Greece before she and King Otto were sent back to Bavaria in 1862, a group of seven cats are intently giving themselves synchronized baths. Syntagma Square, once the site of the garden of the philosopher Theophrastus, is almost completely blocked off by subway construction; Athens vanishes even as it speaks to you, a city always in the process of disappearing and persisting. I choose another route for my errand, and as I wait for the traffic light to change, a bus speeds past. The destination lettered above its windshield is a neighborhood called Metamorphosis.

C
orfu, probably best known now in the world outside Greece as a vacation island, within easy swimming distance from Albania and easy sailing distance from Italy, wildly popular with English and German tourists, might also be known as Twin Peaks, thanks to its origin myth. The island is supposed to be the sickle with which Khronos, Saturn, castrated his father Uranus. The twin peaks near the town’s old fortress, Koryphai in Greek, are probably the origin of the ancient name Corfu; they are supposed to be Uranus’s petrified testicles.

In any case, Corfu was the sickle that destroyed ancient Hellas, as the nominal cause of the Peloponnesian War. Corfu’s close proximity to Italy made it a commercial prize, positioned to dominate trade between northern Africa and the Levant and northern Europe, and also made it a passageway to the destruction of the Roman Republic—Mark Antony said his last goodbye to his wife Octavia here, and sailed to join Cleopatra. Corfu backed Antony and Cleopatra against Augustus, and had all its civic monuments destroyed for its unlucky choice. Emperor Nero, acting as both his own impresario and his own vocal protégé, sang to a captive audience
here. Corfu’s connection with Italy continued in the medieval period, when the island became a Venetian protectorate, which it remained until Napoleon put an end to the Venetian Empire. When the British, in their turn, put an end to Napoleon’s empire, Corfu became a British protectorate, from 1815 until 1864, during which time Edward Lear of limerick fame spent time here, painting luminous watercolors of the island and writing an endearing journal of his residence. Corfu, never under Turkish rule, also sent many young men to Italian universities, developing a concentration of Greek intelligentsia, and a homegrown aristocracy, able to acquire, with money, effort, chicanery, or marriage, Italian titles. It also developed a reputation, like other neighboring Ionian islands, for much sharper class distinctions between its monied and peasant populations than existed in other parts of Greece.

The first president of modern Greece, Kapodistrias, who was murdered by Peloponnesians in an assassination that came to symbolize the conflict over the future of the new Greek state between European-influenced Greeks and the Greek warlords who dominated much of the Greek mainland, came from Corfu. Corfu’s unique position as Greece’s link to Europe was altered dramatically by Greece’s acquisition of Macedonia, and by technology. In the days of sea travel, the rest of Greece depended on Corfu even for news of Europe. Belle Epoque Greek newspapers didn’t have the capital to pay foreign correspondents, so they kept correspondents on Corfu, since according to William Miller, European papers arrived there first, more than thirty hours before they reached the Greek capital. The correspondents would wait for the papers to arrive and then telegraph their newspaper offices in Athens with the crucial stories.

As I wander through Corfu town, with its cricket-playing Greeks, its Italianate architecture and neighborhoods with a strong Italian flavor, and its Liston, two grandly arcaded apartment buildings begun in the island’s brief French period, designed to echo the Parisian rue de Rivoli, I suddenly understand why my coming here
for Easter had been so warmly urged by so many middle-class Greeks. Corfu has an air of unusual confidence, confidence in itself as Western; there is something of a respite here from the tension of fragmented identity of so many other places in Greece, a more orderly sense of the past, a relief from the sense of being torn between East and West, buildings that evoke a continuity with Italy and France rather than Anatolia and Istanbul. Along the esplanade in front of the Liston, the
corso
looks very different from the way it did along the harbor in Kavalla. Here there is a different carriage, a flow to the procession, a sense of self-possession due not only to Easter finery, but, I can see following the eyes of the promenaders as they claim the elegant arcades and fine façades, to a sense of possessing themselves as Europeans: they are vacationing from the complexities of being Greek. Men, women, boys, girls, elaborately coiffed poodles, a different conception of dog than I have seen elsewhere in Greece, parade up and down the passage. Three old men in natty suits sit together at a table reading newspapers, stopping to comment with whirlwind Greek hands. Holy Week is a time of sombre gravity, but here there is an air of barely suppressed festivity.

Three angels appear, keeping company on a palm-sized icon in a shop window. The painting shows the angels dressed in ruby-colored caftans, sitting together at a round table covered with a beautiful sea-green tablecloth just the color of the Aegean in certain lights and depths. You can tell they have come a long way; they have the slightly weary, relaxed posture of people who have arrived at their destination after a long flight, and their bare feet are propped on soft cushions. They look cheerfully hungry; on the table are three tiny forks and three golden goblets, the same gold as their wings and halos. They are talking together with delicacy and wit, to judge from the inclinations of their heads and the appreciative smile of the angel on the right. It is obvious that the cool wine in their glowing goblets and the aromatic scent of their dinner cooking is inspiring them. I know they represent the angels who visited Abraham in the desert and that, theologically, they are supposed to prefigure the
Holy Trinity, but I don’t care. For me they are the angels of the table, presiding over one of the arts of peace, the arts in which the sensual and the spiritual, both physical and metaphysical love, are fused into one substance, far more difficult to accomplish than any of the arts of war. Inside, the proprietress, a woman whose name is Slavic and translates as Mrs. Gift of God, has the most festive air of any merchant I’ve ever seen. “Today I am a floating angel,” she says, “other days I am very heavy, sometimes I am Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But icons are very good luck, for Greek people they are very good luck, and the proof is that you have brought me the first money of the season.” She takes the first drachma note I hand her and tapes it to her file cabinet, so it will draw more in after it, and as a parting gift gives me an agate. “When you want something, you must hold it in your right hand and say your wish very clearly. Then transfer it to your left hand and say, ‘Now.’ ”

I take the angels to my hotel room before I walk to the British cemetery, and am in time to answer a serendipitous call from Kostas, who wants to be sure I go to church tonight. I had planned to go to different churches on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, since every Holy Week service has a different character and drama, and I grumblingly ask him whether that isn’t enough. “No, no, no,” he says, “tonight is the night all intelligent women repent for the sin of their intelligence. So you must be there.” I tell him I am flattered he thinks I should participate, and ask him to explain. “Tonight, along with the hymn to Christ the bridegroom, they will sing the great hymn written by a woman named Kassiani. The story is that when the ninth-century Byzantine emperor Theophilus held a gathering of eligible women to choose a wife, he approached Kassiani with a golden apple, the symbol presented to the chosen bride. He offered her the apple, and said with inimitable tactlessness, one of the worst pickup lines in history, something like ‘Good evening, from woman flowed corruption and our downfall.’ Kassiani, understanding the allusion to Eve, wittily responded with a reference to the Panagia, ‘And from woman welled up the highest excellence,
our salvation.’ This was too clever by half for Theophilus, who took his apple elsewhere. Kassiani retreated to a convent, where she wrote a hymn of lamentation in the voice of Mary Magdalene. ‘Lord, she who fell into many sins has recognized your Godhead and has joined the myrrh-bearing women …,’ ” he chants. “So she repents, and joins the women who perfume with their intelligence the altar of male supremacy over them.

“Now I can hear that you want to ask if the men never repent of their own intelligence. But the rest of the story, which you won’t hear in church, raises the question of whether men have any intelligence to repent. Because as in all cultures where men’s sense of power and divinity rests on the theologically sanctified intellectual, moral, and political degradation of women, Theophilus’s descendants ultimately had to drink from the river he had poisoned. The woman Theophilus chose instead of the brilliant Kassiani helped sponsor what is considered one of the great political missteps of the Byzantines, which eventually contributed to the destruction of the empire. After Theophilus’s death, his wife Theodora took power along with an uncle, brother, and adviser. She was an advocate of the ruthless persecution of a sect of Christians she and her party considered heretical, who were concentrated on the easternmost borders of the empire. An army was sent east, where this colony was attacked; Christian literally crucified Christian. But the ones who escaped joined forces with the Saracen Arabs, and the process of the undermining of the eastern border began, a process which eventually culminated in the onslaught of the Turks and the fall of Constantinople. So go hear the hymn, and lament your sins, remembering that Didymus the Blind, an early Christian teacher from Alexandria, said that women must never be allowed to write books on their own authority without male supervision.”

The British cemetery is, like all of Corfu, startlingly green, since the island has a higher rate of rainfall than any place I have traveled yet in Greece. It is as much a garden as a cemetery, and I seem to be the only visitor without a sketchpad. A German woman intensely
sketching a flower explains to me that she, like some of the other people drawing, is a professional botanist, and that the cemetery is known for its rare wildflowers. The graves are a fragment of the human history of colonialism, a kind of counterpart to the economically exiled Greek emigrants of
xenitia
, who lived their working lives abroad; these graves represent another kind of homesickness, these are the colonials who never returned, never got home. Most of the dates show them to have died extraordinarily young, though there is one Fanny Smilie, “beloved friend and nurse” of a family, who must have ended her life here in their service, at age seventy-five. Here is the ship’s cook of Her Majesty’s Ship
Devastation
, and a crowd of naval men who died in an accident aboard ship. The tiny coffin of Martha Elizabeth Westcott, who died at the age of six months, rests in a bed of wildflowers; near by is a sculpture of a woman, her head held disconsolately in her hands, as if she can’t lift it, her face turned to the side, and cracked straight across, as if the stone grieved. The gardener and proprietor of the cemetery comes up to me, wondering if I am looking for a relative. He walks with me, telling me he was born right here on the cemetery grounds, as were his children, and he points out his house. “Unbelievable,” he says in a characteristic Greek phrase, “but true nevertheless. It makes friends shudder; the Orthodox don’t like cemeteries, you know. They don’t come here to enjoy the garden, they say ‘
nekrotafeio
’ and they make their signs of the cross. But I don’t feel that way; I am at home here, the dead don’t irritate anyone, they ask for nothing. Only the living come here and ask for special favors and disturb the world—look down, here are some wild pansies.” He points out near a tombstone with a snail sitting on it a few stems of a delicate throatlike freesia that has double flowers, each with a pattern of purple marking, and tells me it is rare. A giggling and singing child is riding a tricycle on the dazzling flowered paths behind the graves—“My grandchild,” he says.