Dinner with Persephone (9 page)

Outside of Athens, the road is punctuated with cypresses, poplars, eucalyptus, palms, olive trees, and pink and white oleanders, known here as bitter laurels, having been roundly cursed by the Virgin Mary. The Panagia, overcome with grief at her son’s crucifixion, had been urged by him to prepare the funeral meal, refresh herself with some wine, and take something to eat, to comfort herself because he would be resurrected. A lady called Holy Beauty was passing by at the time, and along with an observing oleander, taunted the Panagia in the malicious style I heard in my courtyard yesterday: “Who ever saw the son on the cross and the mother at the dining table?” The Panagia gave as good as she got, in the recognizable accents of a Greek villager—she willed the oleander to take on her own bitterness in its sap, and she ruined Holy Beauty’s career in Christianity, telling her she would never be celebrated in any liturgy or have a Christian feast dedicated to her. In Greek Christian mythology, both the Panagia and Christ are as vengeful as the American Southern Baptist Jesus is free with damnation.

There is another story I like about the oleander, this one about Saint Barbara, because it seems to me to be a kind of Christian counterpart to the story of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, who changed into a laurel to escape him. The legend says that Saint Barbara was dazzlingly beautiful, and that her pagan father wanted to connect himself to a wealthy and influential family by marrying her to its son. As Daphne ran through the forests, Barbara ran away into the mountains, and sang as she ran, “Mountains, take my body’s elegance, and forests my thick tresses, and you, oleander trees, take my face’s loveliness.” Unlike Daphne’s, her prayer was not to be saved in another form as a tree, but to shed altogether her sexuality and her beauty, her life as a part of nature. The stories show something of the world as it was cloven between pagan and Christian, and each
has a criticism to make of its social world in the form of refusing to participate in sexual life.

Leda is telling the Cypriots the story of Pelops through the small microphone that is always part of the equipment of tour buses. I am surprised at this, thinking they must know it, but later she tells me that the older members of the group very possibly won’t have been taught it, and may not have had much school anyway. The poplars by the side of the road are steady on their steep ground, straight, brave, slim and green as kouroi climbing their cliffs. Yiorgos, the driver, puts on a tape of
skyladika
, “doggish” music, a fierily melodramatic kind of nightclub music, which can be either grossly vulgar or superbly animal. It shows off the distinctive timbre of Greek voices, in any case, the pent-up throaty quality of the men’s, the peculiar smoky fleshiness of the women’s, which you can trace all the way up into Maria Callas’s voice, which has a tinge of this, a magnificent but never ethereal sound.
Skyladika
offers a very different outlet than our nightclub music, which is supposed to sophisticate you, to teach provincials about dry wit and dry champagne, initiated by former provincials who can show you the ropes—
skyladika
offers a chance at wildness, to imagine yourself doing all the things that would scandalize the neighbors on your courtyard, to divorce yourself from the practicality that colors even Greek erotic life, where the tradition of the arranged marriage is still strong. “Twice, twice,” the woman on the tape guts her lyric like a hunter does a game animal. “Twice, I made the same mistake.”

We pause at a truck stop for cold drinks. Inside there are the Middle Eastern sweets Greeks love, sugary pastes covered with sesame seeds or paved with pistachios—chocolate seems glaringly of the New World in this assortment. And besides, the gastronomic logic of this candy is that it is elastic, it will not dissolve in this heat as chocolate does. There are toys and newspapers, bottles of wine, shelves of the inevitable icons and factory-made wooden stamps for impressing church bread with sacred symbols. Leda is amused because the Cypriot travelers seem bursting with curiosity toward
me and at the same time overcome with shyness, and she wonders who will make the first approach. When we get back on the bus, she whispers to me that an oblique attempt was made—someone sat in my place, and was soundly corrected by another passenger—“You can’t sit there,” said the voluntary policeman of my empty place, “an English girl sits there.” The occupant vacated the seat resentfully, but took the opportunity to make a severe countercorrection. “It is not an English girl who sits here,” she said haughtily, “it is a Welsh girl.” The barrier is finally broken by a ten-year-old boy who is being given the trip as a summer treat by his grandparents. “Who are you?” He slides boldly into the seat behind me. His name is Kharalambos, after one of the eastern saints on the other side of the gulf between East and West. I look him up later, and discover that he was murdered by polytheists in the second century because he would not respect their gods, and that on icons he is often portrayed trampling a flame-breathing female demon, that he protects flocks against disease and is invoked against epidemics. The boy Kharalambos on the bus has the bustling air of someone with a great deal of information to exchange, and already has the national dark shadows that give many Greek eyes their hereditary tragic look. I answer his question, and he makes his own interpretation, “Oh, so you are becoming Greek.” He bustles off to tell his grandparents what he has learned and, I see from the pantomime, to ask if he can come forward to sit with me for a while. They examine me with friendly caution. The grandmother is a sturdy woman with a pleasant but mistrustful face, an expression I am already familiar with, a cautious-eyed smile that promises the security of disinterest but offers nothing else, although it is a face that would blaze for any family member, however despised. Her husband is a different but again already recognizable type: square-built and tubby, his face beaming with promiscuous but shallow hospitality—a demeanor that puts its arm around the world in order to put its hand into the world’s pocket, a practical hospitality that is the civilized beginning of business. I pass inspection, and Kharalambos hurries up the aisle.

We reach Olympia in time for lunch and file off the bus into a taverna where places are set for us. A farmer, filthy from his morning’s work, is just sitting down by himself; the brothers who own the taverna know him well, and before he touches the chair, race toward him with lengths of paper for him to sit and lean on, and a cold beer. The Peloponnesian sun is profoundly undemocratic. You wake up when it is light, it rules your appetite, literally forces you to drink and to sit down in the shade—you take orders from it. Around 3:00
P.M.
you take a nap as if you had been drugged, and around 5:00
P.M.
you wake up when your western-facing rooms burst into sunset flame. The heat is massed in Olympia as if it came from the force of all the bodies that had ever existed. Leda rushes the Cypriots through the museum, knowing how short a time they will tolerate it, only long enough to take pictures of the colossal statues. What is left of Olympia, and our own modern interpretation of the Olympics, gives us a very partial view of it, particularly of the inseparability of the presence of death from the important Greek festivals of antiquity. Our Olympics concentrates on the rewards for achievement, but the Olympics of antiquity, with its throngs of statues of victorious athletes, those always unsuccessful attempts to outlive one’s body, and its altar to Zeus, made of the ashes of the athletes who died at each Olympics, was seemingly filled with unconscious irony. Even its patronage under the mythological Pelops, who founded by engineering the murder of his own would-be murderer the doomed house of Atreus, implies that there are no victors.

There is an odd repressed femininity about the place, where married women couldn’t watch the competitions on pain of death; in a relief of Athena, the goddess delicately and tactfully stands behind Heracles, with an enabling hand under the weight he is lifting. And when we walk through the athletes’ entry to the stadium, it can only be described as vaginal, this long tunnel leading to an arch, releasing the athletes into daylight, struggle, victory, and defeat. Going into that tunnel and emerging into the sunlit stadium was a birth into the condition of life itself.

Leda gives the boy Kharalambos an expert thrill by asking him to stand on a rock on which a commemorative statue of an athlete had been mounted. Put your feet in the hollow places on the left and right, she tells him, and he does, radiant with being looked at—he holds up both arms in a victory pose, and adores himself as a statue. When she finishes her explanation, she says, “Bravo, Kharalambe,” using the vocative, “we thank you.” He clambers down from the rock and turns a series of cartwheels on the dusty, pebble-pitted ground of the sacred precinct. While we, laved with heat, drift toward the cold drinks stand, Kharalambos runs ahead, dancing a few steps of a
zembekiko
, looking back to see if we are observing the statue dancing.

Leda, the bus driver, and I steal away to a secret beach during the siesta. It is concealed by railroad tracks, and a modest climb through a forest and over some sand dunes. The piny hill smells almost perfectly like the incense one of the
kyries
burned on the third floor that morning of Metamorphosis, and on the pine-needle-covered trail over the hill are stalks and stalks of velvety wild sage. Wild sea lilies grow out of the sand dunes, and beyond them is the Ionian Sea, warmer than the Aegean, silkier on the skin, with currents washing our legs with sudden surges of cool new water, like ideas changing.

When we meet before dinner, Kharalambos is watching a Greek athlete competing in the Olympic synchronized swimming on television. His grandfather nods to me. “She’s a dolphin,” he says, “a dolphin.” The announcer says that the coverage of the Olympiakes Agones will continue, and I think that to the Western ear,
agones
sounds with an intuition of the special tragedy of athletic competition, in which the skill we see enacted may be unrepeatable, in which an athlete’s prowess is slipping away even as the crowds applaud, in which at the moment of victory even the winning athlete is losing. Kharalambos looks up at me, chewing gum. “Are you Greek yet?” he asks.

On the bus next morning, Kharalambos and another boy his age appropriate the seat behind me. He amuses himself by making me
tell him in Greek the names of objects he points to. “What’s this?” he asks, holding out a finger. “
Daktylos
,” I say, good student. “And in English?” he asks. “Finger,” I say. “And what is finger,
vre
?” he asks. I am wondering how in any language to sum up the phenomenon of the finger, when Kharalambos says impatiently, “Finger. It means to sex, to sex,
vre.
” And with scornful disappointment, he turns to his friend and says, “She doesn’t know anything about it.”

Patras is a scruffy-looking port with ramshackle offices off the harbor offering tickets to Italy, the U.S., the Ionian islands, and painfully, Yugoslavia. This city is the center of the largest Greek pre-Lenten carnival, and its central avenues are lined with amusement parks, small-scale Ferris wheels, and the ubiquitous Disney characters painted on various chariots and floats. It is also said to have a serious unemployment problem, and the skeletal look of the place makes me sense what a sharp economic necessity is underneath those festival carnival costumes.

We pull up outside the cathedral of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Patras. The cathedral is huge and new, reasonably tasteful, but too much like a spiritual supermarket, with all the traditional products supplied in bright new versions. On the steps we are met by a priest, who in what Leda says is a common arrangement with various travel agencies receives a fee to meet groups of pilgrims and conduct small services of blessing for them. The priest has a luxuriant chestnut ponytail and a showmanlike smile of warm condescension, like a Hollywood agent representing an extremely famous and much-sought-after client. All the group dutifully purchase and light candles as they follow him to a chapel containing the remains of the saint, while he explains how the church recovered the saint’s head after its five centuries of exile in Rome. We pass a large, trivial, but childishly pleasing folkloric painting of the Panagia with outstretched arms embracing the port of Patras, including this very cathedral of Saint Andrew in which she has been represented. It is a kind of aesthetic mathematics, creating a presence by multiplying it into infinity, and placing it in an endless series within itself. We
stand behind a low gate in the chapel next to the reliquary itself, and the priest sings “Kyrie Eleison,” throwing his stole over the heads of the people nearest him. When he ends the prayer, he begins to speak about the Turkish occupation of Cyprus, while many of the tourists begin to sob. He speaks of a monastery dedicated to Saint Andrew, which is now in Turkish territory. “I will pray for you,” he says, “and for the day you will be free to make pilgrimages to your monastery, when your saint will no longer be enslaved.” It is a remarkable display of the convergence of two kinds of power, the magic and ritual, that create a romantic, divine yearning, and the political instruction linked to the magic at the moment of greatest receptivity.

After the speech, the group passes through the gate of the chapel, kissing the priest’s hand and kissing the thickly ornamented head-shaped gilt case, pulsing with jewels as if they were the ideas of the dead, that holds the martyr’s head. Some pass the priest drachma notes and pencil names on paper for special blessings. Some of the Cypriote are still shaken with the emotion of the priest’s speech, and Kharalambos’s grandfather shakes his head. “Well, God must find the solution,” he says, “God and the Americans, since it was they after all who brought this about, they who wanted the Turks to partition the island so they could have their bases. It’s a wonder they left the Greeks any territory at all.” For him, the Turks and Greeks lived together on Cyprus before the 1974 invasion in a golden age of harmony, but I know that can’t be true. I get on the bus for the trip back to Athens with a deep sense of the futility of getting at a reliable version of what happened, from either the Greek, the Turkish, or the American side. A family are seated in aluminum garden chairs in front of their small grocery store, playing backgammon. The game is briefly interrupted as the priest who blessed the group arrives to buy a watermelon. Orthodox priests don’t cut their hair, and his hangs down in a long ponytail under his black fez. He gathers his black skirts in his hand, climbs into an expensive-looking German car, and goes roaring off down the avenue. A sticker on the back of the car reads, “Macedonia is only Greek.”