The Colossus of Maroussi (9 page)

There was a little crowd at the quay when we landed. The gendarme eyed us suspiciously. What had brought us to a place like Spetsai in such weather…why hadn’t we come on the big boat? What was our business? The fact that Katsimbalis was a Greek and had gotten off the big boat by mistake made things look even more suspicious. And what was the crazy American doing—there are no tourists coming to Spetsai in the winter. However, after a few grunts he trundled off. We went to a little hotel nearby and wrote our names in the big book. The proprietor, who was slightly goofy but sympathetic, looked at the names and then said to Katsimbalis—“What regiment were you in during the war? Aren’t you my captain?” and he gave his name and the name of the regiment. When we had changed our clothes John the proprietor was waiting for us; he had his little boy by the hand and a baby in his arm. “My children, captain,” he said proudly. Mister John steered us to a
taverna
where we could get some excellent fried fish and some
rezina
. On the way he told us in English about his fruit store in New York, at one of the subway entrances uptown. I knew that subway entrance very well because I had once sold a fur-lined coat given to me by a Hindu to a taxi-driver for ten cents one winter’s morning at three a.m. just outside Mister John’s fruit store. Mister John, who was a little goofy, as I said, found it hard to believe that any native-born American would be so crazy as to do a thing like that. While we were jabbering away in English a fat fellow who had been listening attentively at the next table suddenly turned round and said to me with an impeccable upstate accent—“Where are you from, stranger? I’m from Buffalo.” He came over and joined us. His name was Nick. “How is the good old U.S.A.?” he said, ordering another pint of
rezina.
“Jesus, what I wouldn’t give to be back there now.” I looked at his clothes, obviously American, obviously expensive. “What did you do there?” I asked. “I was a bookie,” he said. “You like this suit? I’ve got seven more of them at the house. Yeah, I brought a supply of everything along. You can’t get anything decent here—you see what a dump it is. Jesus, did I have a swell time in Buffalo. When are you going back?” When I told him that I had no intention of returning he gave me a strange smile. “Funny,” he said, “you like it here and I like it there. I wish we could swap passports. I’d give a lot to have an American passport right now.”

When I awoke the next morning Katsimbalis had already left the hotel, Mister John said I would find him down the road by the Anargyros College. I swallowed Mister John’s greasy breakfast and took the road along the waterfront towards the college. The college, as well as most everything else of importance in Spetsai, was donated to the community by the cigarette king. I stood at the entrance admiring the buildings and as I turned to go I saw Katsimbalis approaching with a great flourish of the cane. He had in tow a friend of his—Kyrios Ypsilon, I shall call him, to be discreet. Kyrios Ypsilon was a political exile, I discovered; he had been transferred to Spetsai from some other island because of his poor health. I liked Kyrios Ypsilon at once, the moment I shook hands with him. He spoke French, not knowing any English, but with a German accent. He was as Greek as Greek can be, but he had been educated in Germany. What I liked about him was his keen, buoyant nature, his directness, his passion for flowers and for metaphysics. He escorted us to his room in a big deserted house, the very house in which the famous Bouboulina had been shot. While we chatted he brought out a tin tub and filled it with warm water for his bath. On a shelf near his bed he had a collection of books. I glanced at the titles, which were in five or six languages. There were
The Divine Comedy, Faust, Tom Jones,
several volumes of Aristotle,
The Plumed Serpent,
Plato’s Dialogues, two or three volumes of Shakespeare, and so on. A most excellent diet for a prolonged siege. “So you do know a little English?” I said, Oh yes, he had studied it in Germany, but he couldn’t speak it very well. “I would like to read Walt Whitman one day,” he added quickly. He was sitting in the tub soaping and scrubbing himself vigorously. “To keep up the morale,” he said, though neither of us had made any remark about the bath. “One has to have regular habits,” he went on, “or else you go to pieces. I do a lot of walking, so that I can sleep at night. The nights are long, you know, when you are not free.”

“He’s a great fellow,” said Katsimbalis, as we were walking back to the hotel. “The women are crazy about him. He has an interesting theory about love…get him to talk to you about it sometime.”

Talking of love Bouboulina’s name came up. “How is it we don’t hear more about Bouboulina?” I asked. “She sounds like another Joan of Arc.”

“Huh,” he snorted, stopping dead in his tracks, “what do you know about Joan of Arc? Do you know anything about her love life?” He ignored my reply to continue about Bouboulina. It was an extraordinary story he told me and I have no doubt that most of it was true. “Why don’t you write that story yourself?” I asked him point blank. He pretended that he was nor a writer, that his task was to discover people and present them to the world. “But I never met a man who could tell a story like you,” I persisted.

“Why don’t you try telling your stories aloud—let someone take it down just as you tell it? Couldn’t you do that, at least?”

“To tell a good story,” he said, “you have to have a good listener. I can’t tell a story to an automaton who writes shorthand. Besides, the best stories are those which you don’t want to preserve. If you have any arrière-pensée the story is ruined. It must be a sheer gift…you must throw it to the dogs…. I’m not a writer,” he added, “I’m an extemporaneous fellow. I like to hear myself talk. I talk too much—it’s a vice.” And then he added reflectively: “What good would it do to be a writer, a Greek writer? Nobody reads Greek. If a man can have a thousand readers here he’s lucky. The educated Greeks don’t read their own writers; they prefer to read German, English, French books. A writer hasn’t a chance in Greece.”

“But your work could be translated into other languages,” I suggested.

“There is no language that can render the flavor and the beauty of modern Greek,” he replied. “French is wooden, inflexible, logic-ridden, too precise; English is too flat, too prosaic, too business-like…you don’t know how to make verbs in English.” He went on like that, flourishing his cane angrily. He began to recite one of Seferiades’ poems, in Greek. “Do you hear that? The sound of it alone is wonderful, no? What can you give me in English to match that for sheer beauty of resonance?” And suddenly he began to intone a verse from the Bible. “Now that’s a little more like it,” he said. “But you don’t use that language any more—that’s a dead language now. The language hasn’t any guts to-day. You’re all castrated, you’ve become business men, engineers, technicians. It sounds like wooden money dropping into a sewer.
We’ve got a language
…we’re still making it. It’s a language for poets, not for shopkeepers. Listen to this—” and he began reciting another poem, in Greek. “That’s from Sekelia-nos. I suppose you never even heard the name, what? You never heard of Yannopoulos either, did you? Yannopoulos was greater than your Walt Whitman and all the American poets combined. He was a madman, yes, like all the great Greek fellows. He fell in love with his own country—that’s a funny thing, eh? Yes, he became so intoxicated with the Greek language, the Greek philosophy, the Greek sky, the Greek mountains, the Greek sea, the Greek islands, the Greek vegetables, even, that he killed himself. I’ll tell you how he killed himself some other time—that’s another story. Have you got any writers who would kill themselves because they were too full of love? Are there any French writers or German writers or English writers who feel that way about their country, their race, their soil?
Who are they?
I’ll read you some of Yannopoulos when we get back to Athens. I’ll read you what he says about the rocks—just the rocks, nothing more. You can’t know what a rock is until you’ve heard what Yannopoulos has written. He talks about rocks for pages and pages; he
invents
rocks, by God, when he can’t find any to rave about. People say he was crazy, Yannopoulos. He wasn’t crazy—he was
mad.
There’s a difference. His voice was too strong for his body: it consumed him. He was like Icarus—the sun melted his wings. He soared too high. He was an eagle. These rabbits we call critics can’t understand a man like Yannopoulos. He was out of proportion. He raved about the wrong things, according to them. He didn’t have
le sens de mesure
, as the French say. There you are—
mesure
. What a mean little word! They look at the Parthenon and they find the proportions so harmonious. All rot. The human proportions which the Greek extolled were superhuman. They weren’t
French
proportions. They were divine, because the true Greek is a god, not a cautious, precise, calculating being with the soul of an engineer….”

Our stay at Spetsai was prolonged because the boat for Nauplia failed to appear. I began to fear that we would be marooned there indefinitely. However, one fine day along about four in the afternoon the boat finally did show up. It was an unserviceable English ferry which rolled with the slightest ripple. We sat on deck watching the sinking sun. It was one of those Biblical sunsets in which man is completely absent. Nature simply opens her bloody, insatiable maw and swallows everything in sight. Law, order, morality, justice, wisdom, any abstraction seems like a cruel joke perpetrated on a helpless world of idiots. Sunset at sea is for me a dread spectacle: it is hideous, murderous, soulless. The earth may be cruel but the sea is heartless. There is absolutely no place of refuge; there are only the elements and the elements are treacherous.

We were to touch at Leonidion before putting in at Nauplia. I was hoping it would still be light enough to catch a glimpse of the place because it was this grim corner of the Peloponnesus that the Katsimbalis side of the family stemmed from. Unfortunately the sun was rapidly setting just behind the wall of rock under which Leonidion lies. By the time the boat dropped anchor it was night. All I could distinguish in the gloom was a little cove illuminated by four or five feeble electric bulbs. A dank, chill breath descended from the precipitous black wall above us, adding to the desolate and forbidding atmosphere of the place. Straining my eyes to pierce the chill, mist-laden gloom it seemed to me that I perceived a gap in the hills which my imagination peopled with rude, barbaric tribesmen moving stealthily about in search of forage. I would not have been the least surprised to hear the beat of a tom-tom or a blood-curdling war whoop. The setting was unrelievedly sinister—another death trap. I could well imagine how it must have been centuries ago, when the morning sun pierced the fever-laden mist, disclosing the naked bodies of the slain, their stalwart, handsome figures mutilated by the javelin, the axe, the wheel. Horrible though the image was I could not help but think how much cleaner that than the sight of a shell-torn trench with bits of human flesh strewn about like chicken feed. I can’t for the life of me recall by what weird modulation we arrived at the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, but as the boat pulled out and we installed ourselves at a table in the saloon before a couple of innocent glasses of
ouzo
Katsimbalis was leading me by the hand from café to café along that thoroughfare which is engraved in my memory as perhaps no other street in Paris. At least five or six times it has happened to me now that on taking leave of a strange city or saying good-bye to an old friend this street, which is certainly not the most extraordinary street in the world, has been the parting theme. There is without doubt something sinister and fascinatingly evil about the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre. The first time I walked through it, of an evening, I was literally frightened stiff. There was something in the air which warned one to be on one’s guard. It is by no means the worst street in Paris, as I have hinted, but there is something malignant, foul, menacing, which lingers there like a poisonous gas, corroding even the most innocent face until it resembles the ulcer-bitten physiognomy of the doomed and defeated. It is a street that one comes back to again and again. One gets to know it slowly, foot by foot, like a trench which is taken and retaken so many times that one no longer knows if it is a bad dream or a monomania.

In a few hours we would be at Nauplia, within striking distance of such breathtaking places as Argos, Tiryns, Mycenae, Epidaurus, and here we are talking of dingy holes, lye-bitten side streets, dilapidated whores, dwarfs, gigolos,
clochards
of the Faubourg Montmartre. I am trying to visualize my friend Katsimbalis sitting in a certain
bistro
opposite a theatre at midnight. The last time I stood at that bar my friend Edgar was trying to sell me Rudolf Steiner, rather unsuccessfully I must say, because just as he was getting on to group souls and the exact nature of the difference between a cow and a mineral, from the occult standpoint, a chorus girl from the theatre opposite, who was now on the bum, wedged her way in between us and diverted our minds to things less abstruse. We took a seat in the corner near the doorway where we were joined by a dwarf who ran a string of whorehouses and who seemed to derive an unholy pleasure from using the adverb “
malment
.” The story which Katsimbalis was reeling off was one of those stories which begin as a trifling episode and end as an unfinished novel—unfinished because of lack of breath or space or time or because, as happened, he got sleepy and decided to take a nap. This story, which like all his stories I find it impossible to transcribe, lacking the patience and the finesse of a Thomas Mann, haunted me for days. It was not that the subject was so unusual, it was that with a good stretch of sea before us he felt at liberty to make the most extraordinary digressions, to dwell with scrupulous care and attention on the most trivial details. I have always felt that the art of telling a story consists in so stimulating the listener’s imagination that he drowns himself in his own reveries long before the end. The best stories I have heard were pointless, the best books those whose plot I can never remember, the best individuals those whom I never get anywhere with. Though it has been practiced on me time and again I never cease to marvel how it happens that, with certain individuals whom I know, within a few minutes after greeting them we are embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the deep middle dream which the practiced dreamer slips into like a bone into its socket. Oft en, after one of these suprasensible seances, endeavoring to recapture the thread which had broken, I would work my way back as far as some trifling detail—but between that bespangled point of repair and the mainland there was always an impassible void, a sort of no-man’s-land which the wizardry of the artist had encumbered with shell holes and quagmires and barbed wire.