What Casanova Told Me (20 page)
Read What Casanova Told Me Online
Authors: Susan Swan
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction, #General, #Historical, #Psychological
She turned to the next entry by Asked For Adams.
July 12, 1797
I put out a plate of bread to catch a husband.
To amuse myself, yesterday I went with Stavroula to the shrine to Aphrodite on the Acropolis. She told me that the young girls of Athens leave offerings there when the moon is new, hoping the goddess will catch them “a pretty young husband.” It was not as hot, and I followed my little tutor up through the ruins of the old Greek agora. We stopped
by the temple of Theseus, a novel sight in the midst of a cornfield, until she grew impatient and ran off to join a troop of older girls going up to the Acropolis. I lingered, awestruck, thinking of the ancients who trod there long before the first Adams set foot in the New World.
When we fell in step again, Stavroula whispered that the other girls came from rich families, and that it is not usual for Athenian women to go about in public unaccompanied by a chaperon. Certainly, this troop of beauties seemed happy to be on their own. They talked loudly in self-assured voices and, like the Venetian Macaronis, jingled and tinkled prettily because their necks and arms were covered with strings of gold coins.
The girls directed astonished looks at my Paris walking dress whose Grecian banding had been inspired by their dresses. The two embroidered bands—on their hips and beneath their breasts—gave them the appearance of having a double waist. I am certain I looked as odd to them. It was a queer sensation to meet exemplars of fashion in a cornfield.
The girls and I left the old marketplace and traversed a path winding above the whitewashed huts of Athens. From the path, it was possible to look down on the courtyards of the ramshackle houses whose walls are made of mud and pieces of marble from the ruins.
It was cooler up here. A fringe of shrubbery hugged the Acropolis and doves flew in and out of this tangle of greenery. On either side of the path, poppies and mimosa bobbed their heads among the blond grasses.
Finally, high on the northwest side of the craggy hill, we came to a small shrine carved in the rock. Standing at a polite distance, Stavroula and I watched the girls set their
plates on the grotto ledge. Some girls added salt and honey to their dainty offerings of bread. When they left, we went up to the ledge ourselves and Stavroula gave me a conspiratorial smile as she took one of their plates and tossed its contents away. Then she made her own ritual, using her mother’s bread. I did the same, feeling hot and uncomfortable.
The breeze had dropped, and the heavy, still air pressed on our skin. I stared longingly at the Aegean in the distance, glistening in sheets of turquoise and dark blue. The sun’s position told me it was the mythic hour in this land—the hour just before the sun vanishes, when all things shine golden in the pale light. I heard a sudden rustle in the bushes, and flocks of crows flew up above our heads, cawing noisily. Startled, I spun about and there, shimmering in the hazy air, I saw the torso of a male figure glistening like a plant wet with dew. The apparition was unclothed, and its male instrument stood up large and imposing.
I thought of what Jacob said about the beauty of our physical selves. As I stared, a fierce, hot wind blew up the slope of the Acropolis, making my sleeves flap and my hair stream back from my face. The wild gust filled me with exultation, but the next thing I knew the wind had dropped and all was still and sultry as before. Father’s moral peevishness lingers in me, and I turned away from the hallucination telling myself the heat had affected my senses. I said not a word to Stavroula and began to hurry down the slope. She called after me, but I did not wait. The path was wider on this part of the slope. I heard voices nearby, and saw a white horse tethered to a fig tree. And on the grass beside it someone had left behind a single high-heeled shoe. I left the path and pushing aside the
branches found myself in a small grove. Behind a large, pale rock, Jacob lay as if dead. For a terrible moment, I thought of Father abed in Venice. I ran towards my friend, panting from fear.
“Wake up! Please! Are you sleeping?”
Drowsily, he opened his eyes. When he saw who it was, he gave me a delighted smile.
“Dear girl! Is something wrong?”
I could not help myself: in my excitement, I began to describe my vision, and he listened thoughtfully. While I talked, Monsieur Gennaro came walking out of the bushes, shouldering his telescope. Monsieur Papoutsis followed, holding an umbrella above the painter’s head.
“Dom! Come here!” Jacob called out before I could stop him. “Asked For has seen the Apollo Belvedere!”
I did not see the Apollo Belvedere. I know this from having viewed the god’s likeness with Father in the Vatican museum. The statue of the young Apollo wears a fig leaf with serrated edges like the leaves of Quincy maples. And aside from the frozen waves of marble on its head, the Vatican statue lacks bodily hair. I saw something else, and my vision displeased Monsieur Gennaro.
“Her vision lacks the calm grandeur of the ancients,” he said. “It is a crude pagan thing.”
“Ah, but Asked For is opening up to the beauty of the world, Dom,”Jacob said. “It doesn’t matter whether her apparition was pagan, surely?”
Our painter friend grew surly at this, and his eyes followed me, as we returned to our lodgings, in a way I found humiliating.
First Inquiry of the Day: What is the meaning of my vision?
Lesson Learned: If there is a lesson to be learned from seeing a naked god on the slopes of the Acropolis, I do not know it, and neither does Monsieur Gennaro. But I cannot help thinking that if this pagan god turned his back to me I would see that he had buttocks like Jacob Casanova.
The espresso bar grew noisy and Luce finished her coffee and left, eager to get away from the gregarious Athenians. She consulted her map again and headed for the temple of Zeus where Asked For had fought with the Greek shepherds, wearing the Turkish pants that Jacob Casanova had bought for her. Her guidebook said it was built by the Roman emperor Hadrian. She walked down a large hill, and sure enough, its huge marble columns were towering beyond a sidewalk cluttered with stalls of fresh-cut flowers and ticket sellers whose lottery coupons fluttered from spikes as long as medieval lances. She crossed the thoroughfare and in minutes found herself inside the temple grounds, hardly more than a dusty field lined with crumbling stone walls half hidden by bits of greenery. It was quiet despite the nearby traffic and it felt good to be away from the racket of Athens. She drank greedily from her bottled water and stared at the Corinthian columns rising up to the delicate acanthus leaves on their crowns.
She grew aware of someone waving at her across the temple grounds. A dark-haired man wearing sunglasses and a bright yellow-and-black Walkman.
She shook her head, warning him away. Earlier that morning, the old men in the lobby had pestered her, calling out in Greek and offering her their cigarettes. Lee had pooh-poohed the men and their “gentle Mediterranean hustle” and assured her that the incidence of assault was still low in Greece. But
she was growing weary of approaches and she turned to go, just as the man strode over. A dog, a Samoyed puppy, followed, its snowy fur glittering in the hot sun. He looked close to her age, perhaps in his late twenties. He held out her file with the Arabic manuscript.
“This belongs to you,
neh?”
he said, using the Greek word for yes although he spoke English fluently. “I was in the bar and saw you leave it behind.”
“Oh, my God! I don’t remember doing that!”
“It’s from an old book, isn’t it?” He smoothed down a wing of black hair but it sprang back the moment he removed his hand. The effect was one of suppressed energy, as if an interior force was making its way out despite him.
“Yes. And I wish I could read it, only I don’t understand Arabic.”
“I glanced at some pages. It’s not Arabic. It’s in old Turkish writing.”
“Are you Turkish?” Luce asked.
“I am Greek. My family lived in Turkey.”
“Oh,” she said. “Can you read it?”
“It’s too complicated for me, but I have a friend who reads such things. My name is Theodore Stavridis. And you are—?”
“Luce Adams.”
“Where are you staying? I could give you his address.”
“At the Athena,” she said, and instantly regretted her openness. “I must be getting back.” Glancing at her watch she realized she had to meet Lee at the hotel for breakfast.
“I’m late.”
A dog barked and they turned to see his Samoyed disappear into a thicket by one of the old walls. There was a flash of white followed by the noise of frenzied yelping. The Samoyed puppy appeared to have treed an animal. He smiled.
“She is following her instincts.” As he hurried after his dog, he called,
“Ciao
, Luce! We’ll talk later.”
Outside the temple grounds, Luce hailed a cab to take her back to the hotel. Lee was in the lobby, talking to the old porter with a plastic bag in her hands.
“I was just leaving this for you. I thought Aphrodite might like to sample the local fare,” Lee said.
“Thank you.” She took the tins gratefully and put them in her purse.
“You’re welcome. Remember we’re meeting your mother’s friend Christine Harmon and her husband, Julian, for lunch. I’m going to the Blegen Library first to check a few of my facts for my speech tomorrow night. Would you like to come? They have some of your mother’s work.”
“I’d rather continue exploring Athens, if it’s all right with you.”
“Of course it’s all right with me. Do you want a coffee?”
Before Luce could object, the waiter appeared with a tray, and she was obliged to accept a cup of instant Nescafé—the awful muck that passed for coffee at the Athena.
Upstairs in her room, Luce fed Aphrodite a tin of the local cat food and gave him another round of drops. Then she climbed up through the car-free streets and alleys of the upper Plaka to the northwest side of the Acropolis to find the grotto where Asked For had experienced her vision. Behind Luce sprawled the city of Athens and all its suburbs—a vast, smoky white bowl of low-rise apartments and houses that from this height resembled jumbled boulders recklessly scattered by some god—perhaps Asked For’s pagan Apollo. It was still too early in the day for the infamous
nefos
—only a few smoky wisps of smog hovered over the Attic plain. A light north wind was blowing yesterday’s polluted air out to
the sea and she had a breathtakingly clear view of the tiny, gravel-sprinkled terraces below.
She turned a corner onto a narrow dirt path running alongside a wire fence and realized she was standing at the foot of the bulky limestone crag of the Acropolis. Tourists usually approached it from the opposite direction but Lee had told her this way up the hill was quicker and she seemed to have found the right path. It led past clusters of whitewashed houses and then into a small, fragrant pine wood where a young man lay sleeping on a wooden bench. On the back were carved the English words: “Live as you want.”
She tiptoed past him, smiling. Farther down the slope, the tourist stalls were selling ice cream and Loutraki, a local brand of bottled water. Despite the north wind, the sun felt fierce overhead, and she stopped to sit for a moment on the grass.
From her knapsack, she brought out a photocopy of a small sketch that had been inserted into the journal. Its artist, possibly Casanova or the painter Domenico Gennaro, had drawn Asked For skilfully. In the sketch, a young woman with a strong-featured English face stood in pantaloons and a loose-flowing Turkish shirt. A large cap lay in the grass near her feet. Do I resemble her? Luce wondered. Her hand strayed to her cropped hair. The journal suggested they were similar in height and broad-shouldered slenderness, but her own eyes were pale grey, and Casanova had said the eyes of Asked For Adams were the same light green as the Adriatic.
She put the sketch away and moved on along the path up the hill. Suddenly she let out a little whoop. Yes, surely Asked For would have stood right where she was standing now. From here she could look down on a maze of houses and courtyards, like the ones Asked For had described in her journal. Only, the
houses looked sturdier than the mud huts propped up with marble from the ruins that Asked For had described.
She was aware of the warmth of the sun on her face and the smell of the pine woods mingled with something sharp and peppery, perhaps wild oregano. For a moment, she felt as if Asked For Adams was standing next to her, and she waited, half-daring the pagan Apollo to appear. But Luce saw only Athens spread out before her, and the glistening Aegean.
Why did she feel disappointed? She lived in a different age. She started back down the Acropolis path with a sense of loss for all that lay beyond her reach. She was to meet Lee and her mother’s British friend, Christine Harmon, at the Platanos, a taverna in the Plaka. Lee had shown her where it was on the guide map, and Luce had been surprised to discover that the old section of Athens was no bigger than a village. And that, she thought, was exactly what Athens had been in the time of Asked For Adams.
She hurried down the path through a meadow, perhaps the same meadow in which Asked For had found Casanova asleep. And then past the sidewalk cafés on Adrianou where young men and women lingered over iced coffee in the heat-swollen afternoon, listening to the mournful sounds of Rembetika.
Near the Temple of the Winds, around a bend in a lane, she came upon people eating at tables placed in the shade of several large azalea trees. She spotted Lee sitting next to a small birdlike woman and a rosy-cheeked man who was smoking in the ferocious Athenian manner.
The trio rose to greet her, the man quickly snubbing out his cigarette. “This is Christine, Luce.” Lee smiled. “And this is her husband, Julian Harmon, the process philosopher.”
Lee’s nickname made Luce think of processed cheese, as if Julian were a fast-food version of the real thing.
“I knew your mother,” he said, shaking Luce’s hand. “Unlike Lee, she saw merit in my views.”
“Now Julian, Lee’s bark is worse than her bite,” Christine said, extending her tiny hand to Luce. “I am honoured to meet a new Minoan sister,” she added, bobbing her head gracefully in a gesture that reminded Luce of swallows dipping and swooping.