What Casanova Told Me (26 page)

About fifty yards ahead, Luce heard someone yelp in surprise. “Damn it, turn that thing off! Do you want to blind me?”

Julian was on his knees in front of an impenetrable rock wall, his glistening, sweaty face lit up by a flashlight. The flashlight dimmed and Julian’s back and shoulders melted into the rock. The group appeared to be crawling through an opening in the rock face. Was that what she was expected to do? She wanted to turn back, but the floor of the cave felt slippery and treacherous. She carefully bent down and touched it. Her hand came back greasy with wet clay. She took a step backwards, shuddering, and fell hard on her rear end.

“Are you all right, Luce?” Christine called. She saw the dim outline of a woman in the shadows. “Shall I send up one of the guides to help you?”

“No. Please go ahead.” She sat on the damp clay, looking apprehensively at the place where Julian had vanished. Now one of the white-haired women disappeared into the rock and then another followed. She didn’t want to follow them into the bowels of the earth; she would wait until the last one went through and then she would crawl back up to the cave opening. Without warning, someone extinguished the last flashlight and now the world of the cave lay in darkness. She could no longer see the tendrils of sunshine floating down from the cave’s mouth. She had no flashlight, not even a book of matches to light her way back.

Someone shouted from below. A woman had made it to the bottom of the cave. Luce heard another shout and a volley of chattering voices rose up from the depths of the cave. She closed her eyes, and a series of images appeared—as if on a film loop—of angry Greek villagers sealing off the mouth of their cave.
Left without light for the rest of time. The goddess women.

“Psst! Look there! The gods knew how to laugh, eh?”

A torch lit up a small owl carved in a niche on the cave wall barely an arm’s length away, and Andreas loomed in front of Luce, the light spilling ghoulishly across his bearded face. “You fear, eh,
kopela?”

Luce bowed her head. She felt as if the moist air of the cave was choking her. When she looked up, Andreas was farther down the path, and Yannis stood before her.

“I help you!” He grasped her arm and she staggered to her feet. Her head was throbbing.

“I’m all right.” She pulled herself free and started down a few more steps, nearly slipping again on the mud. She felt a weird numbness around her mouth. She ignored the sensation and barely glanced at Andreas waiting by the hole in the cave wall.
Closing her eyes, she hunkered down and crawled through. What else could she do? It was too late to go back now.

She was through to the other side. Andreas and Yannis were close behind; Luce could smell male sweat and the rich scent of cologne. Somewhere below, the weaving shafts of flashlights lit up the glistening stalactites dripping down from the limestone cave overhead. It was a sobering vision, she thought wonderingly. The voices of the women sounded far away, as if they were lost somewhere in the basement of a derelict building.

A beam from a flashlight picked up her Nikes and one of Yannis’s Kodiak boots; they were standing on a ledge hardly wide enough for their feet.

“I take care of you, don’t worry,” he whispered.

Luce couldn’t help herself. “I want to go back!”

“Luce!” Christine called up from below. “Let the guides help you. You’re not in a good position to turn around.”

“If you don’t move, I kiss you!” Andreas said.

She heard Yannis speaking angrily to his uncle in Greek. She ignored the two men and began to edge cautiously across the ledge. “I can’t get enough air!” she croaked. She cowered against the wall rising up behind the ledge, breathing in panicky gulps.

Nearby, she heard Yannis and Andreas shouting in Greek, and then Christine’s voice reverberated again in the darkness. “Luce, put your head in Yannis’s jacket and breathe slowly. You’re hyperventilating. It’s not dangerous.”

Yannis handed her his jacket, and she did as she was told, burying her face in the coarse-grained fabric. Slowly, her breath began returning to normal. “I’m all right now,” she said in a small voice.

Yannis took back the jacket and stood at the edge of the ledge, his arms touching the cave wall to form a protective bridge separating Luce from the open space beyond the ledge.

“Ela
, Luce,” he called to her. “Come.”

Shivering with fear and humiliation, she inched forward, ducking her head under his arms and trying not to look down.

“That’s it, Luce—one step at a time,” Lee called up.

“You okay,” Yannis said. He tapped her backside with his flashlight and made a shooing gesture towards the passageway sloping down to the floor of the cave where the rest of the group sat waiting. Her breath coming again in regular bursts, she began to crawl down the path on her hands and knees. Her mother’s friends clapped as she reached the bottom of the cave.

“Good for you, Luce,” Christine called out.

She was in a large oval space, perhaps fifty feet wide, with a high ceiling. A cluster of pumpkin-coloured fairy lights had been placed near a huge white stalagmite, ringed like a giant icicle with dripping calcite. The group were seated in a circle around the natural formation, and Luce guessed from their serious faces that it was meant to be a representation of the Great Minoan Earth Mother.

“We are here today to honour Kitty Adams,” Christine began. “There will be some moments when the flashlights are turned off. If anyone becomes frightened, don’t hesitate to ask me to bring back the light.”

“Blessed be,” someone murmured, and several voices answered, “Blessed be.”

“Lee, why don’t you start?” Christine said.

A flashlight illuminated the face of her mother’s companion standing directly across the circle from Luce. Lee looked foreign and strange—a handsome figure whose head might have been carved from the limestone of the cave.

“I’m offering water to The Great Earth Mother of Crete in honour of my companion. If I’d been more generous, she might still be here,” Lee said in an unfamiliar, remorseful
tone. Luce heard the noise of liquid hitting the earth. The little jewellery-draped icons on the altar gleamed wetly. “Without water, the human race would perish. Without Kitty, I am without water.”

Luce was taken aback by the pain in Lee’s voice, and by her admission that she was not faring well without Kitty. Across from her, she heard Lee blow her nose, and stared sympathetically in the other woman’s direction, but she could no longer see Lee in the gloomy flickers of light.

“Blessed be,” a chorus of voices said. Luce thought of the Anglican services her aunt Beatrice had taken her to as a child. She remembered people standing up and sitting down again, murmuring repetitive refrains, just like her mother’s friends today. For a moment, she felt comforted.

Christine said, “Julian? Can we hear from you?”

“I am leaving a Cretan jar of honey because I found Kitty’s company sweet,” Julian said, his voice ragged. “I’m not a Minoan sister, but a chap like me can still appreciate Kitty’s work …” His words trailed off and Luce realized he was deeply affected. After a moment, he resumed: “So I have chosen to say the words of the American poet Walt Whitman … ‘I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles.’”

“Thank you, Julian,” Christine said.

In the wavering light of the candles, Luce glimpsed Julian rise to his feet and place a jar by the plump Neolithic goddesses on the altar. When he was back in his seat, Christine rose and poured wine over the small figures. “First water and then wine to the goddess Vritomartis and to Skoteini, the dark one who lives in the cave. And now, in honour of Kitty, I am going to call out the names of my female ancestors. And I want
each of you to do the same. Start with your own mothers and grandmothers and then go back as far as you can.

“I am Christine, daughter of Jane, daughter of Martha,” Christine began.

Through a trance of sadness, Luce heard voices calling out in Greek and English, and the women’s names seemed to float above her in the damp air of the cave. “I am Luce,” she whispered, “… daughter of Kitty, granddaughter of Pauline.” Around her, the voices were melting into the rock walls of the cave in quavering echoes
.

As the last voice faded away, Christine spoke:

“Luce, do you want to say something about your mother?”

She began to cough. Her body shook in chest-rattling bursts. In the gloom, someone slipped an arm around her shoulders and she heard a voice whisper, “Luce, drink this.” An object, warm and rubbery, was thrust into her hands.

“Do you want to say something?” Lee whispered.

“Yes.” Luce drank gratefully from the bottled water and she brought out the scrap of paper on which she had written down the words of Jacob Casanova. She balled up the paper in her fist. She couldn’t read in the dim light.

“I … I am trying to remember a quote from a journal that belonged to my great-great-great aunt—well, I don’t know how many greats she was.” Luce heard gentle laughter. She waited a moment, then continued. “‘Why do we cry out for our mothers at the moment of our death?’” she said softly. “‘Because we need them still, and we may travel to the end of our lives before we know this truth.’”

There was silence. Austere and total. Then Christine whispered, “Light and darkness.”

“Light and darkness,” the group whispered back. Someone lit a candle and slowly, one by one, the flashlights were turned
on again, their beams glowing like amber wands in the still air of the cave.

As Luce stumbled out of the cave, leaning on the shoulder of Lee Pronski, she stared in awe at the billowing folds of green foothills around the little church of Agia Paraskevi. The afternoon sun was still spilling its honeyed light on the Aegean landscape that seemed to bear no relationship to the strange, forgotten Minoan landscape underground. My God, she thought, it’s beautiful, the earth is beautiful.

“It’s a relief to be back above ground, isn’t it,” Lee said.

“Thanks for helping me. I panicked. I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry. It was too hard. I should have realized that before. Here, let’s rest. I have something to say to you.”

Luce let Lee lead her to the little Orthodox church and they sat down on the bench by its door.

“Did your ancestor write the words you spoke?” Lee asked as they sat down.

“No, it was Casanova.”

“Really? Well, it was a good choice. Now, Luce, I need to know something.”

“Yes?”

“Do you still want to go to Zaros?”

Luce nodded.

“Then you should go. I’m going to talk to Christine. She and Yannis will find a way to get you there.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“No. Gaby and I had a falling out. I will tell you about it another time.”

“Thank you, I’d like to see where my mother died.”

“We agree then. Good.” Lee rose, sober-faced and magisterial, and Luce followed, her young face bright with relief.
On the other side of the road, a long line of women were filing into the bus.

It was early evening as Luce watched the backlit shadows of the speeding motorcycle on the roadside cliff. Christine had talked to Yannis and he had arranged for his friend Achilles Tridafilakis to drive her to Zaros. And now she was doing what she swore she’d never do, riding for hours on a motorbike without a helmet. Under her legs, Achilles’s bike jumped forward in steady bursts of power as vignettes of nineteenth-century village life rushed by: isolated farms without electricity, and pretty lighted villages where men lounged in cafés and women and girls sat on front stoops shelling peas.

By the time Achilles’s bike drove up the hill into Zaros, the sun was setting behind the Psiloritis mountains. It wasn’t hard to find news of Gaby. Everyone knew who she was. Her home was a few miles from the old monastery, up one of the mountain passes.

Still, it felt like hours to Luce before Achilles found the house with the nineteenth-century Turkish numbers still above the door. It stood back from the road, a homely whitewashed building with a cornflower-blue door, an icon of peasant life replicated in the tourist postcards of the Aegean. In the yard, a tethered goat cropped the grass near a small grove of almond trees. When it heard the bike, it lifted its shaggy head expectantly. Luce said goodbye to Achilles and stood for a moment on the road, getting up her nerve. As the roar of the bike faded, she became aware of sheep bells. In moments, she was trapped in a stream of dusty, woolly animals whose bells chimed prettily in different octaves. She stared down timidly at the giant cloud of fleece. A shepherd called to his dog circling behind them and the sheep scattered and flowed together
again, the tinkling of their bells only intensifying her sense of aloneness. For a moment, she faltered.

Then the sheep moved on, freeing her, and she walked into the yard with her graceful, loping stride and knocked on the blue door. She heard the noise of a bolt being drawn, and a panel fell open. Behind an iron grille, a burly arm appeared, and a stocky, round-faced woman stood before her adjusting her hairnet, her mouth full of bobby pins.

“Neh?”
the woman said.

“Gaby,” Luce said softly. “It’s me, Luce. Kitty’s daughter.”

“Kitty? You Luce?”

Luce nodded shyly. The door opened and the round-faced woman pulled Luce into her arms, pinching her cheek and shouting Greek words of welcome.

“You come! Good. I expect you, Luce.”

Luce let Gaby lead her into a small sitting room furnished with a stiff Victorian sofa and chairs. She knew she was in the right house. A large framed photograph of Kitty and a young man hung on the wall by a small stove. Luce stared in amazement at her mother smiling up at the proud-looking young man with fierce black eyes. She realized the young man was Constantine Skedi, and she was struck by the protective expression on his face as he smiled down at her mother. It reminded her of her own feelings about Kitty. Had her height made her think of herself as her little mother’s protector, she wondered. Or was it some childlike quality in her mother that drew this protectiveness out of those close to her?