Dinner with Persephone

by Patricia Storace

  “This Olympics belonged to us; and if the rulers of the planet had recognized what they owe us, we would have solved these problems, and others, too. But we are a small country, and the superpowers decide our destiny for us,” the Mustache says.

  “Squashes,” his wife says, “kolokythia. Nonsense. Look at how we punish the tourists. At the height of the season, it takes them three hours to go through passport control after a transatlantic flight and two more hours for a taxi, because all the bus drivers are on strike! We punish them and we pretend it is just happenstance.”

  Before a full-scale argument begins, the table finds a new outlet for its aggressions by teaching me to curse in Greek. I am taught to thrust my hand forward, in something like our high-five motion, and to snarl, “Here it is!” This, Leda thinks, is probably from a Byzantine way of wishing death on someone, a gesture of smearing them with ashes, which was a mourning custom, along with tearing the clothes, the hair, and scratching the cheeks.

  I am taught to call out “Masturbator,” which is mild unless you add an excruciatingly explicit diagonal pulling motion to it. “And if a neighbor annoys you,” the businessman gestures with relish, “you point between your legs and tell them to write it on your balls.” I don’t see the use of this for myself, but he says, “Then write it on what’s there.”

  “Or borrow the baker’s,” Leda suggests, “as I have done on occasion.” The table starts an obscenity party, teaching me these phrases with mischievous delight, as if they were teaching them to a talking parrot. And oddly, I, who blush easily in English, can reel off the worst phrases in Greek with phlegmatic indifference. The blush seems to depend on some encounter between a child self and an adult self which can’t be reproduced in a language you learn as an adult.

  The businessman, whose father is from Smyrna, the port in Turkey that was once so associated with its Greek population that the Turks called it “infidel Smyrna,” is telling stories about how his father went to school with Onassis, who was also from Smyrna. A round of whispered teasing follows his mention of Smyrna. “He is a Turk,” the Mustache winks. “Baptized not in holy water, but in yogurt.” The businessman drives the teasing off with a cryptic epigram—“If Greeks are Turks, then many Turks are also Greek; Karaghiozis-Karageuz,” this last being a reference to the beloved shadow puppet figure shared in Turkish and Greek versions of the popular cycles of plays in both countries.

  The businessman makes a hobby of a small vineyard, and produces his household wine from the grapes, but he is saying with a worried look that he thinks someone may have “eyed” it, because his sister found her dog there a few days ago, dead of the evil eye. “You see,” he explains to me, “the eyes produce electricity, as does the mouth—the whole body is charged, but especially the eyes and mouth—and the evil eye is a product of a kind of negative magnetism in a person, who may not always be aware of possessing this power. And this negative magnetism makes the victim have an accident or get sick or lose something he treasures. Animals die of it often, since they have fewer defenses.”

  “Horses always die of it,” adds the Mustache, “because they never vomit.”

  “Many people say it is just fthonos,” Leda says, uttering one of the key pieces of Greek vocabulary, a word for a poisonous omnipresent jealousy. Fthonos is a word as old as Homer; it used to mean the particular jealousy and malice the gods displayed toward humans that caused them to promise a hero immortality, then snatch it back, or to lead a person into a trap. This divine malice seems now to belong only to mortals in their relations to other mortals.

  “Fthonos surely has something to do with it,” says the businessman. “We are a strange people—it is a disgrace for us to be the unwilling means for any other Greek’s advancement. This is why we are so patriotic. We love the patrida so much—because—we hate each other.” He shakes with cheerful laughter. “You don’t believe me?” he asks. “Look.” And he takes a newspaper from an empty chair pushed away from our table, opening it to the classified ads pages, and points to one. It is an ad from a Kyria Kalliope, offering kafemandeia, coffee-cup readings, tarot card readings, and palm readings. “If enemies of yours who are jealous of you have made magic against you, she can tell you their names and can bring luck again to your house.” He points to another, Kyria Agapi, Mrs. Love, whose ad says that she is “dowered by God with the power to protect you from your enemies and to expel the evil eye from operating on you.” She offers also consultations via phone to Greeks living abroad. I hand him back the paper. “You see?” he says.

  “Can you tell me who has the evil eye?” I ask, having long since accepted that I am not being teased.

  He touches the blue glass eye he wears as a safeguard around his neck. “It would help if you could always tell, but you can’t. Often people with frowning brows pulled together in the center of the forehead have it—and of course people with blue eyes.”

  The fear of the evil eye, I know, is felt throughout the Middle East—there are charms against it in Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Persian—and it is an ancient fear, mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. But the blue glass eye, the possible suggestion that bad luck comes from Europe, intrigues me.

  The world of magic so often has its roots in the concrete social world; not so much its polar opposite, but its inseparable familiar—that blue glass eye hanging on the Smyrniote’s neck reminds me of the Gothic minority in fourth-century Byzantium, a half-forgotten example of the mobile nature of racial prejudice. For in fourth-century Byzantine society, the fair-skinned and the blue-eyed were objects of physical disgust and fear, they were household slaves, street sweepers, cannon fodder as mercenaries in the army, people in daily contact with contamination, with refuse and with blood, an exploited population who it was feared would revolt one day and slaughter their masters and commanders. By the sixth century the situation had changed and the Gothic population had been absorbed, but I wonder if the blue glass eye might not have been at one time a charm against having the bad fortune to be a Goth, a charm to keep the bad luck of the blue eye out of your own face.

  Perhaps the blue-eyed crusaders who sacked Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, are also concentrated in this charm, but this small unseeing eye may have been first a charm not so much of protection as of projection, that stunning psychological mechanism of the powerful, which is so often the unacknowledged presence in classical Greek tragedy, the real death’s-head at the feast. It is the means through which the murder of Iphigenia by her father is presented as social necessity, while the murderous response of her mother Clytemnestra is portrayed as a demonic outrage. It is the means by which Oedipus’s crimes against his parents are grossly magnified while the fact that the cycle of tragedy began with his parents’ exposing their baby to die on a hillside is a matter of convention. The blue glass eye holds a reminder that it is not only the victim who is afraid of the murderer, but the murderer who is afraid of the victim. Leda spoke of the evil eye as a result of fthonos, but it may be equally a protection against the fthonos within as against the fthonos without.

  “At least there are spells against it,” says the Smyrniote. “My aunt, who by the way is a very skilled reader of coffee cups, if you should ever like to look a bit into the future, has taken it off people sometimes.”

  “And priests can too,” says the Mustache’s wife. “There is a prayer against it in the prayer book.”

  “In the Orthodox prayer book?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says the Mustache’s wife, “I can show you, we have one in the knife drawer of the kitchen.” She brings back a black leather book with a ribbon marker and reads, with comments by the others, “Healer of our souls … we beg you, send away, banish, and drive out every devilish operation … every plot, magic and evil and injury and evil enchantment of the eyes of the evil-doing and malicious people, from your servant.” Church Greek is hard for me—you need dictionaries of New Testament—period Greek to read it—but it seems almost equally hard for them; they stumble and
argue over words and have to shruggingly let whole phrases go without the right dictionary to help with the puzzles. But Greek is a strange lawless combination of both continuity and fragmentation. Although it is true that a substantial amount of ancient and modern vocabulary is the same, it is also true that there are nineteenth-century authors whose works need glossaries, even dictionaries. There is an enormous pride in the continuity between ancient and modern Greek, but there is also another pride, almost a secretive ideal, in the vision of a world in which each Greek author would require a private dictionary to be approached. But in this country of Greek and Turk, ancient and modern, Roman and Byzantine, East and West, Christian and polytheist, the language itself is full of hidden kinships and ambiguities. Christians were once called atheists, in the Greek of late antiquity. “Anathema on the hour that I met you” is one of the bitterest things you can say to an old love. But go far back enough in Greek, and you will find that at one time anathema meant simply whatever was dedicated to a god, whether cursed or blessed—it is possible to call the Parthenon itself, begun in 447 B.C., an anathema of victory over the Persians. There is, it seems, an unwitting blessing even in this violent dismissal.

  What is unnerving about this evil-eye prayer is that the evil eye seems to be a product of both evil and good—at times to come from malice, at others to arrive simply as a response to a human gift, beauty, or virtue or good fortune.

  “So remember,” says the Smyrniote, who has to go back to his office, “don’t compliment anyone unless you say ftou ftou ftou three times, because unless you show that you cancel out the compliment by spitting, you might accidentally bring the evil eye on them.”

  The rest of us finish a bottle of the wiry Greek white wine, and the conversation gets dense with things for me to see and do and read. “You must watch Lampsi (The Shining), the most famous Greek soap opera,” says the Mustache’s wife, “it will be wonderful for your Greek.” Her husband glares at her. “Well, it will,” she holds her ground. “They repeat so much to keep you up with what you missed.”

  “Soap operas,” the Mustache says contemptuously. “Imitation American soap operas. Has she seen the Parthenon? Are you going to take her to the son et lumière?” he roars at Theo and Leda. “The Acropolis at night, now that is beautiful. You should see the illumination, have dinner together afterward, and then come back to walk around late in the neighborhood. Maybe Patricia will hear the marble girls cry.” He hardly needed my questioning look as a motive to explain. “You know of course, that the English milordi”—a hellenization of “my lord,” whose Greek ending gives it an inexplicably sarcastic air in the hearing—“stole one of the kores who stood on the Porch of the Maidens and held up the Erectheum. They say they bought it from the Turks, but it was not the Turks’ to sell. And you know we are going to have it back. Melina—Mercouri—will get it back for us. But anyway, when the milordi stole the kore, the Parthenon was a Turkish fortress. Greeks were only allowed there with permits, so we couldn’t defend all our treasures. And the milordi wanted the rest. So they sent a party of Turks up there at night in secret, to take the other girls away in the darkness. But when the Turks climbed up there, they heard the girls’ voices calling and sobbing for their sister, and when they got closer they heard anguished screaming like women being raped, and they dropped their shovels and ropes and ran away. The milordi couldn’t bribe them to go up there again, and some of those Turks went mad, supposedly, they could never stop hearing the screams of women they couldn’t see, and the screams were terrible, violent, because it is so hard for marble to cry. So people who live in this neighborhood used to claim that on certain nights they heard the marble girls crying for their sister who was kidnapped by force, and they say Greece won’t be Greece until she comes back again.”

  “Gentle madam, no,” says my inner voice silently and oddly as I look at the crusading insistent exaltation in his face. The phrase’s source floats to the surface of my mind: a moment from Antony and Cleopatra, that play about passion and illusion in which the pair have to destroy each other because their love is sustained by myth, not life. Cleopatra says of Antony, “His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear’d arm/ crested the world; his voice was propertied as all the tun’d spheres … Think you there was, or might be, such a man/ as this I dreamed of?” Her attendant answers, “Gentle madam, no.”

  The party begins to break up because we are nearing siesta time, still very much a part of the Greek summer, even if it is beginning to disappear in the cities in wintertime. But the Mustache is still wound up about the milordi and wants to tell one more story about them, so while Theo fiddles with his car keys, the Mustache tells me a story he says he had from his grandfather.

  “Where do you think the milordi came from?” he asks me rhetorically. “England,” I reply helplessly.

  “Wrong, at least in my grandfather’s story. They came from Greece. They are pre-Christian Greeks, a remnant of the ancient idol-worshippers. He said you could tell they had never been Christian because you never saw them crossing themselves, as all Christians do. One time when he was visiting me here and we were riding the trolley near the English church downtown, we saw English people carrying cages and cats and leading dogs into their church. A woman on the trolley asked out loud, ‘Are the English Christian?’ And my grandfather said not very patiently, ‘Of course not, woman. You don’t see that they take their animals to church?’ He explained his idea to me, that when the other Greeks became Christian, the milordi would not give up the old gods, and so they took all their wealth and emigrated to Europe. And those people are the ancestors of the milordi, and that is why they fight with us in our wars, and why they came back to take the marbles of the Parthenon with them to England, it is the old sympathy in their blood. And that is why they have houses here and so many of them feel the need to visit here every summer and to pay homage, just like they used to, to the ancient stones.”

  Theo is now very anxious to get on the road for home, so we leave with thanks and embraces. I run into a pharmacy before it closes for siesta to buy a tube of sunscreen. The sales clerk hands it to me in a bag printed with the Star of Vergina and the slogan “Three thousand years of Greek Macedonia.” We weave through the traffic, and when someone cuts in front of us, Theo leans out the window, pulls at an imaginary penis, and shouts, “Masturbate, masturbator! Play with it more! Keep masturbating!” There is a startlingly rhetorical, formal quality to Greek insults, almost as if the speaker were trained to take a theme and elaborate on it. It is a quality taken to its height in the orations of John Chrysostom, a Byzantine church patriarch who was a master of ornamental invective, as are a number of high-ranking contemporary Greek clerics. I wonder if I am hearing in Theo’s imperatives of contempt a trace of the Byzantine schooling in rhetoric, in which a student had to deliver patterned speeches both of praise and insult.

  Shutters are closing at my apartment building for the quiet hours, and I climb the stairs as quietly as I can, looking forward to a nap myself. I am just drifting off when a fight erupts, a trio: two women—one mezzo, one soprano—and a man, a baritone. The mezzo’s accusations rush like fountain spray, while the soprano’s defense joins her and then rises above her even more spectacularly like a fresh jet of water from a new source in the fountain—there is twenty minutes at least of this, with the man’s voice weaving between both. Every time it seems to subside there is a fresh outbreak, and I am amazed at the inexhaustible jets of fury. It is a terrifying opera for someone vulnerable in the language, since you are conscious of the prospect that the fight will escalate and you will be swept into it, without the right words to soothe or mediate. This is how babies must feel when their parents fight—the sense of helpless endangerment, of being an inarticulate witness to something that may destroy you, of being captive in speechlessness, like being adrift in an ocean and seeing a rescue ship, but knowing you can’t call loudly enough for it to hear.

  Sure enough, my doorbell rings, and there is a spluttering woman
standing there. “Did you hear my radio, did it disturb you?” she shrieks at me.

  “Not at all,” I say, which seems to calm her.

  “It is those Albanians below, they always cause trouble and blame it on me. They are not used to life among civilized people. But you will say you did not hear a radio if anyone asks.”

  Since I did not, I will. She retreats to her own apartment.

  Albanians at the moment have the reputation of being the Joads of Greece, ignorant dustbowl characters who are perceived as threateningly, desperately, criminally poor. Albanians pour across the borders to work illegally in Greece, and Albanian gangs supposedly rob, rape, murder, and carry their internecine quarrels into Greece. The Greeks also accuse them of maltreating the Greek minority in Albania, and there is an inflammable border dispute about southern Albania, a region which the Greeks say was unjustly incorporated into Albania and which is called here “northern Epirus,” to emphasize that it is part of the Greek region of Epirus. When I was looking for apartments to rent in the newspapers, I came across a number of ads with the proscription “No Albanians.”

  I want to try to sleep again, but the prolonged fighting was too nerve-wracking. The Mustache’s bitter remarks about the Olympics are still in my mind. On an impulse, I reach for my new dream book. The entry I am looking for shows a definitive break with the world of Artemidorus. Koka-Kola—“This vulgar, banal, and unhealthy drink that has imposed Western industrialism throughout the world has passed already into the world of dreams where it is a familiar symbol; an inauspicious dream. If you see others drinking this manufactured beverage in your dream, be on guard of superficial relationships. If you yourself are drinking it, your motives toward them may be suspect without your having realized it.”