Dinner with Persephone (8 page)

“To idealize and to sublimate. We honored our statues as representing excellence and divinity—but we have also at times violently hated our own art. Statues like my namesake, for instance, and like many others that will never be found, are not just headless because of accidents, but because they were attacked by angry Christians, or by the emperor’s troops, who would decapitate them, and sometimes bury them, neutralizing their demonic powers by building churches over them. Imagine lynchings of statues. Saint Augustine
himself cheered like a football fan when he saw a crowd attack a statue of Heracles. They tore its gold beard off. But those buried statues have, in a way, risen again. Let me tell you a story from our revolutionary war. You know General Makriyiannis, the illiterate who wrote the memoir and became the first master of modern Greek prose? During the war, he acquired two statues, one a woman, the other he thought was a prince; he was awed by their craftsmanship, and mentions that you could see the raised outlines of their veins. He rescued them from some soldiers, who had abducted them during a raid on the island of Poros, and were planning to sell them for a fine profit to some Europeans at Argos. Makriyiannis took the soldiers aside and told them that no matter what the sum, they should never allow these statues to leave our country. He told them, ‘It was for the statues that we fought.’ ”

We order two more coffees, staving off the confrontation with the shadeless sidewalk and frantic Athenian traffic. Aura wants to know what impressions I have of Greek theater, but I haven’t yet been to a play, I have only so far had encounters with Greek television programs. I am amused by the national soap opera, with its shipping magnates, scandal-making politicians, and the incestuous charge of its love affairs, which seem to occur almost exclusively within the family circle, a brother in love with his brother’s wife, a stepson courting his stepmother persistently in corners of the family mansion. It is startling too, to see the fine work of the actors lavished incongruously on television material—Greek actors make their living largely on TV, supplemented by stage work and the small Greek movie industry, so sitcoms and soap operas are populated with many fine, classically trained actors, and serial adaptations of Greek fiction are finely crafted and eagerly awaited cultural events.

I have also been painfully stunned by the daily scenes of women being beaten and slapped, in comedies, in dramas, in serials, in movies, from the fifties to segments taped last week. I kept a log for a week, to test whether the shock of seeing these matter-of-course beatings was making me exaggerate their frequency, but “daily”
wasn’t even an adequate description. Fistfights between men were much rarer than the episodes of men hitting women, so incessant that they seemed as much a matter of national taste as of dramatic necessity. In one week of casual viewing, I saw a sister beaten by a brother in a lyrical island drama, a daughter in a high-spirited comedy slapped sharply across the face by her father, a wife in a soap opera slapped by a husband for impertinence, a melodrama in which a wife was repeatedly beaten savagely and then raped by her husband’s brother, an episode of a dramatic serial in which a woman’s boyfriend seduces her by slapping her until he reveals to her her desire for him, and a comedy about a dominating mother and a village boy who cannot seem to lose his virginity, even after his marriage. The movie concludes with his mother calling for him downstairs in the night, while his young bride waits upstairs. He asserts to his mother that he is now master of the house, and that it is up to him to command. Upstairs, in his bridal chamber, he slaps his wife, and climbs on top of her, able at last to consummate the marriage. It is hard for me to imagine the effect this incessant imagery has on children—schoolgirls and boys watching movies with their parents after supper, watching twenty minutes of a movie before they start their homework after school. Only a week of this reminds me that one of the most important, if not the most important of nineteenth-century Greek novels, a classic of Greek realism, is called
The Murderess
, about a woman who concludes that the lives of Greek women are intolerable, and begins to murder little girls, to spare them.

“I had never quite grasped how shocking such violence must seem to an outsider,” says Aura, “almost as if it were a pillar of our culture, even celebrated.” She sips at her coffee. “To idealize and to sublimate. Now that I think of it, I am not aware of anything in our criminal code that defines beating or any kind of physical violence to women as a criminal offense. But for the mutilation or any physical damage done to statues, the penalties are very severe.”

T
oday is the Feast of the Metamorphosis, known to us as the Transfiguration, when Christ allowed his disciples to glimpse the radiant divinity he had previously withheld from his face. This shimmering alteration is a part of all miraculous tales, even present in one as familiar as Cinderella, in the changing of the pumpkin into a coach and the metamorphosis of an abused, miserable, dirty child into a glowingly beautiful and lovable woman. In Greece, it is one of the commonest subjects for icons, Christ’s face like the sun surrounded with golden rays, and disciples dropping awed to their knees before him, while the word “Metamorphosis” sparkles somewhere in the painted scene, here in this country of the double nature, where even the language has a double nature, divine and mortal. “Leukos Oikos,” the White House, people say in the classically flavored Greek which deifies what it names;
aspro spiti
, white house, people say giving directions, using the word for house that emerged from the crusaders’ word
hospitum.
The idea of metamorphosis is here too as a fantasy shaping political life. The Ottoman province Greece had been, the fantasy went, after 1821 would be revealed as an eternal idea, and would take back, piece by piece, all
that it had lost—first from Rome, which it felt had usurped its classical culture. Then it would be revealed again as a territorial empire, with Istanbul, transformed again into Constantinople, as its capital. And at last it would be recognized as the Empire of Time itself, governing not only territory, but history and civilization.

It is six o’clock in the morning, when the air is cool and fresh, with the spicy scent peculiar to Attica, compounded of orange and lemon trees, sage, eucalyptus, cypress trees, scents that coexist with the equally pervasive ones of chlorine cleansers, cooking lamb and garlic, and gasoline. Someone on the third floor has been up even earlier, because the hall outside smells like a church this morning from the strong odor of incense. Maybe it’s Kyria Maro or Kyria Flora—on feast days, old ladies put incense into the ornate brass censers you can buy for home use (in my neighborhood you can find one of these, or indeed any ecclesiastical object, stole, eternal lamp, six-foot candles, much more easily than you can find a wooden spoon or a pepper mill), and cloud all the corners of their houses and the apartment house corridors with the holy fragrances. I reach for my dream book to see if there is an entry under “metamorphosis.” It is a promise of good luck to see this icon in a dream, transferred directly onto your sleep, like a scene transferred onto a set of china. “For those who see this scene, good fortune. They may find glory through their ordinary, daily activities, an ordinary tool they work with may turn out to be an important invention, leading to a new business, for example a housewife’s cake may lead to opening a bakery, a mechanic’s wrench may lead to some innovation in a car’s engine. And those who see this dream will be recognized and win followers. If many people see this dream during the same period of time, some national glory can be expected.” Like the gods and goddesses in ancient dreams, who in Artemidorus are dreamed in the form of statues, the Christian god must be dreamed the way he is imagined in art. It is interesting, too, to see how optimistic this prediction is—I know a whole category of transformation dreams from Artemidorus, for whom metamorphosis is potentially more ambiguous. As always in his world, who you are in
your waking life affects the outcome of the dream. The same dream affects men and women, free people and slaves, differently. This Christian dream is more about an absolute revelation of power than the ones in Artemidorus, which are concerned with changes in your social condition. The people he talked to dreamed of changing sexes, of their bodies turning into precious metals. If a slave dreamed he was turned into silver or gold, he could expect to be sold. On the other hand, if a rich man had this dream, he could expect to be plotted against, since everything made of silver and gold attracts scheming people. For a man to dream he was changed into a woman was good for a poor man, bad for a rich man: a poor man would gain someone to look after him, but the rich man would lose all authority. On the other hand, it almost always foretold improvements if a woman dreamed she became a man. If unmarried, she would marry. If childless, she would have a son, “and, in this way, she will change into the nature of a man.” And it was an excellent dream for a harlot, a prediction that she would never lack for clients.

I hear the sounds of church chants from a radio or television down the hall, celebrating the Metamorphosis with the trancelike vocalizing of Orthodox ceremony, which combines inexhaustible rhythmic repetition with sinuous vocal ornament—the cantor sings like the blood circulates, if only it circulated forever. The pungent rosemary-laden smell of the incense seeps under my door.
Livani
, it is called, from the archaic word for the aromatic incense that used to be burned at sacrifices. The whole floor smells as if it is cooking, but without the scent of the missing meat. I look up incense in my dream book, though I should really be checking to see if I have packed everything I need for my trip to Olympia this morning. “Whoever sees that a priest swings a censer toward him and comes into contact with the fumes is being flattered and deceived.” This is a piece of dream technique familiar from Artemidorus, the dream that relies on a play of words for its meaning. The verb
livanizo
, to cense, also means to flatter—he is mad for incense, you say about someone, meaning he adores flattery. But the technique used so skillfully by Artemidorus
also reflected a poignant limitation which he must have recognized—that you could rarely successfully interpret a dream dreamed in a language you didn’t understand.

I wait downstairs for Leda to pick me up—she is guiding a Cypriot group through Patras and Olympia and has invited me to join her. I am curious not only to see the towns, but about what it will be like to see them in the company of people who have a stake in this heritage instead of people who don’t. I look at the tenants’ names by their bells, something I couldn’t study at leisure when everyone is awake. There’s a dentist, a journalist, the inevitable teacher of foreign languages, and a majority sprinkling of Peloponnesians and Cretans, origins detectable from the suffixes of their surnames.
Poulos
is the common Peloponnesian suffix, meaning child of, as in Yiannopoulos, Johnson.
Akis
is a diminutive meaning little, as in Grigorakis, little Gregory, and is the usual Cretan suffix, though when attached to nouns it can be either affectionate or derisive. Come here,
mikraki
, you hear people calling to toddlers, and the word makes them not only small but microscopic, Lilliputianly adorable. The same suffix attached to “American,”
Amerikanaki
, is offered as a provocative insult, to diminish these people, naive and foolish even if they are tall and come from a big, powerful country. Along with the
pouloses
and the
akises
, there is one Alvertos Koen, who in New York, I think, would be Albert Cohen.

People are on the streets very early in summer, both to outwit the heat before it conquers them and to marshal the ubiquitous tour groups on their trips before the traffic worsens. The tourist industry turns out to be as tied to early rising and seasonal fluctuation as farming ever was—from June to October is harvest season, and a remarkable proportion of yearly income has to be earned right now. The Greeks are farmers of people, and the newspapers constantly monitor the size and conditions and vagaries of this year’s crop compared to last.

The Cypriote are staying in a no-frills hotel near Omonia, the square named Harmony to evoke Paris’s Place de la Concorde,
although it is a squalid center for cheap hotels, and at night, drug deals, prostitution, and mugging—Athens is an unusually safe city to walk around in at night, because so much of its life is lived nocturnally, with its late dinner and theater hours, but everyone says sternly, Never go down to Omonia at night, and never never go down to Omonia at night by yourself. Leda puts me on the bus behind the driver, an old friend of hers, and goes to work with luggage and vouchers, shepherding the Cypriots onto the bus. This is a working-class group, tiny, lantern-jawed, with eyes like transplanted olives, and dumfounded expressions. Their bodies have the short height and all-weather stature of prehistoric figurines, and make me newly aware of what an important feature of divinity height was, seeing how rare it is. The monumental freestanding statues of the ancient world reflected this, and the gods appeared in dreams as significantly taller than mortals. And I’ve been told that the military has to work hard to cull enough tall men to function as the ornamental foustanella’d guards of the presidential residence and parliament. The foustanella, the pleated skirt of nineteenth-century Greek soldiers, is a poor sight on a short man—without a well-muscled luxurious length of leg to fill the tights worn with it, and to balance the fluffy, elaborately pleated skirt, the poor men look like bearded mushrooms.

“
Gaidouria
, donkeys, peasants.” The bus driver jerks his head toward the boarding Cypriots, with a joking regional insult. One man hears him, and ripostes, with a warning smile, “
Kalamarades
, scribes, bureaucrats,” in the spirit in which an American might say “Philadelphia lawyer.” If the Greeks slur the Cypriots as peasants, the Cypriots slur the Greeks as pen-pushers, itinerant letter-writers, bureaucrats recording legal transactions, and lying about facets of them along the way whenever it is profitable. Whatever energy is being squandered on regional chauvinism is being squandered through one of the charming features of the Greek language—the insult belongs to the same family of words as
kalamari
, that delicious squid we eat fried in batter, but also “inkwell,” as is
sensibly derived from this ink-squirting fish. It is a charming example of the frank physicality of Greek, the way a noun is drawn dripping from the sea, or pulled from the ground, cleaned off a bit, and put to use.