Dinner with Persephone

by Patricia Storace

  It is the most skeptical fairy tale I have ever heard, and I tell Kimon so. He laughs, and says, “Naturally. We are profoundly skeptical, like all truly superstitious peoples. Privately, I think this is why we are so disturbed by infidels, by the beliefs of other peoples. Because we are afraid what they believe gives them some advantage we are being cheated of. Because we don’t believe anything we say ourselves. Because as the story tells, we wouldn’t take even God’s word at face value. You are aware of course, that we have two verbs meaning ‘to love’? Now the standard explanation for this is to say that one has the nuance of to love with the heart, to give love, the other is to desire with the body, to want love. But I think we have two because when we fail at one, we can always claim we meant the other. Shall we walk back down slowly and have an ice cream?”

  We stop at a patisserie whose menu features full-colored eight-by-ten glossy photographs of possible sundaes, each one with a name out of mythology: the Aphrodite, the Danae, the Adonis, names from the old gods. Kimon leafs through the booklet and comments that it is perhaps a mark of the change in religious sensibility that these voluptuous temptations could not be called after Saints Cecelia and Catherine and Stephen, despite the fact that Danae and Adonis had similar violent deaths.

  “I hope you don’t mind ancient goddesses and so forth with your ice cream, Patricia,” he says and winks at me. I smile back. It seems to me they’ve instinctively got it right, that eating ice cream, the sweetness that disappears even as you pursue it, is about as close as you can come to the classical idea of pleasure.

  I order the Persephone, a scoop of ice cream decorated with pomegranate seeds. Kimon orders the Leda, two scoops of vanilla covered with rosettes of whipped cream and studded with tiny paper Greek flags that is set before him in a swan-shaped dish. Persephone and Leda melt quickly in the late-afternoon sun, vanishing into milky pools before we have a chance to finish our immortal ice creams.

  WISHES AS HISTORIANS

  “Guide them into the harbor of salvation,” I read while on the ferry to Naxos, in the prayer against storm winds and tempests at sea. A couple who have no language in common are communicating solely through kissing. They pause to grip each other’s thighs, stare out to sea, and kiss again. In the prayers of a people are their longings and their fears—at least those they are allowed to voice publicly. The prayers for special occasions in the Greek Orthodox prayer book are also atoms of social, political, and economic history, at least until the Second World War—it is one of the ironic results of the bitter Greek experience of four hundred years of Ottoman occupation that it seems to have preserved well into the 1970s a sense of continuity with the medieval world that the Renaissance ended in the West, but here has only recently begun to be disturbed. It is an even more dazzling piece of historic irony that an element of the Greek sense of eternity, of world without end, may be drawn from the economic and social immobility of the Ottoman years, as well as from the unchanging agricultural challenges of this region. And of course, from the Christian translation of Platonism, so poignant in these prayers which see this world as a damaged version of a perfect prototype. “Would the ancient Greeks be proud of us and our Athens today?” is a question often posed to schoolchildren, and according to Kostas, has become a standard filler human-interest story that appears at least once a year in some newspaper or magazine. He sent me a sample when I was on Thasos, with a newsprint photograph of cherubic children visiting the Parthenon with their teacher, measuring their modern distance from the perfect Greeks, the ancient ones.

  What do they pray for, what did they need, what were they afraid of? They pray that new-dug wells be blessed, that their water be pure and drinkable, here in this part of the world where water is a precious commodity still, and later this year will be so strictly rationed that exceeding your limit carries threats of fines and even imprisonment. They pray against harm that might come to vineyards, fields, and gardens. They pray to bless fruit, wine, olives, seeds, at planting and harvest, and vintage time when the grapes are pressed. They pray to exorcise evil spirits from the things they are trying to grow, and they pray with tragic regularity against each other, against ruin that might come from human malice. They pray against their old gods who threaten them as demons that need to be exorcised from the streams, trees, and rivers over which they used to preside, and need to be driven out of the human bodies they can still possess. They pray against deadly illnesses of cattle, swine, horses, goats, sheep, mules, and donkeys and bees. There is a prayer over silk making, which was once an important Greek craft—the Peloponnesus is sometimes called the Morea, in memory of the abundant mulberry trees that grew there. They pray that the little silkworm will survive unharmed and will grow and multiply in the name of the god who promised to father Abraham that his seed would multiply as the stars of heaven and as the sands on the seashore. The prayers over food are reminders of the constant hunger of this world; as one historian, Peter Brown, has written, “Food was the most precious commodity in the ancient Mediterranean.” A traditional fillip of the Karaghiozis shadow puppet plays the Greeks adapted from the Turks was Karaghiozis’s merry promise that “tonight we’ll eat, we’ll drink, and again we’ll go to bed hungry!” During the German occupation of 1941–44, when the Germans requisitioned Greek produce to send to Germany, so that more Greek citizens died than in any other occupied country, one famous Karaghiozis master cut plays that referred to food from his repertoire, because he would not torture the audience. There are prayers over cheese, and God, the true nourishment, is asked to bless meat, and salt, that preservative cornerstone of the stored foods that meant survival. There are prayers against the rotting and spoilage of flour, honey, olive oil, wine. They pray with poignant specificity, at all contacts with water, the building of all kinds of ships, the moment of voyage, the completion of fishing nets. They pray over the foundation of a house, so important that dowry houses were often the critical factors in whether or not a girl could marry, and they pray over the moment when the members of a family enter a new house. They pray to welcome someone who has worshipped as a Roman Catholic back to Orthodoxy. I remember that I have yet to see a church dedicated to Saint Peter, and will not see one during my time here, although they may exist. But Peter seems primarily identified as the putative progenitor of the Roman church—and of course, Western churches dedicated to Constantine, the founder of the Eastern church, are also rare.

  They pray, having lost Constantinople, first to the European Christian crusaders, and later to the Turks, and having seen the swastika flying from the Parthenon, against invasion by “other races of people”; they pray against civil war, still so traumatized by the last one ending in the early fifties that most people cannot bring themselves to speak of it; they pray against plague, starvation, fire, sword—they pray not to experience what they have experienced, their prayers pit them against the very world they live in.

  Being here has taught me to be conscious of the metaphors which words are often built from, expressions at the same time of the brilliance and the limitations of each of our perceptions. The word for government, from which our own word derives, is a marine metaphor, connected to the ancient Greek vocabulary for rudder, ship’s pilot, and the verb “to steer.” I have read on the other hand that the Arab word for politics descends from an ancient Middle Eastern word for horse training. And prayer? The metaphor at the heart of our English word is from the Latin precarius, something obtained by entreaty, also the source of the word “precarious.” The Greek word for prayer, on the other hand, means “a wish.”

  White gulls fly alongside the ferry, beautiful inscrutable scavengers. I look again at the couple caressing each other, their hands touching faces and thighs in a passion of wishing. Naxos is quiet on this late Sunday afternoon as we sail into its harbor with a view of the Portara, the monumental gate in the square shape of a Greek letter pi that was part of a temple of Apollo. The Venetians who took Naxos as a victory prize after the Fourth Crusade were said to ha
ve used remnants of the temple to build the fortress castle which was the nucleus of Naxos town. It is their presence that is most marked here, in the Venetian colonial architecture scattered through the countryside, in the small-scale medieval town they built and lived in as seigneurs, establishing a feudal system that was ended only after the Turkish conquest, in the Roman Catholic cathedral and uneasy Catholic coexistence with the Greek Orthodox. The Cretan novelist Kazantzakis was sent to the school operated by Roman friars here in what is now the island archaeological museum, although his father harbored dark suspicions that the friars were trying to convert him.

  The Portara was also supposed to have been where Dionysus, born on Naxos, appeared to claim the abandoned Ariadne. Or at least one of them, since in the Greek world of relentless dualisms, there seem to have been two Ariadnes, one of whom died when abandoned by Theseus, and was worshipped with funeral liturgies and mourning chants, and another who survived the abandonment and was married to Dionysus, celebrated with wedding songs and dances.

  The passage from the ferry through the screaming, shoving swarms of room renters, who fight you for your suitcases and press your face into photographs of their rooms, is like something out of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. The fortress town is superbly beautiful, with views of the sea that are almost shocking in their inexhaustibility and brilliant color. The town is laid out on the amoeba plan, with houses radiating from each other via communal walls, and forming a common defensive outer wall. It combines defensive necessity with religious sensibility, a maze of tunnel-like streets and low gates and sudden forks that lead into unknown passageways, and would either stymie an invader or confront a visitor with revelations, like the unexpected angel I am facing now, standing in a carved niche over a doorway I never meant to find. Here you find your way by being lost. Still, although the sun sets as dramatically as a great lover makes love, the streets resound with tapes of cheap beach holiday music and the restaurants offer the kind of “international” cooking that is quintessentially provincial. Kimon and Elpida have given me a letter to a friend of theirs who is the president of an inland village, and I am glad to be going tomorrow to look him up.

  I set out early so that I can stop at villages on the way. It is easy to see, as I drive, why Naxos was Byron’s favorite of the Greek islands, with its confluences of romance. There is the romance of legend, the romance of aristocracy, the romance of desolation in the uneasy, agitated-looking brown mountains that climb and fall as sharply as a heart patient’s cardiogram, and the romance of fertility in the interior, all terraced vineyards, olive trees, fruit orchards, potato fields, houses swathed in bougainvillea and jasmine, like rich women in furs. Naxos is the largest Cycladic island, and there is something palatial about its scale, the way the terraced farmland makes a grand formal descent into the valleys, like the impressive staircase of a grand house. I stop to look at a Venetian lord’s tower, with a small stone chapel curled against it like a house cat. The little chapel has a dual identity: one aisle is consecrated for Greek Orthodox worship, the other for Roman Catholic.

  The village of Apiranthos is a world of marble, even nicknamed marmarino, “made of marble”—it must have once been a wealthy village, as the elaborate marble plaques, carved with names and dates over many of the doorways, suggest. Now, though, the crusty proprietor of a museum grumbles that all the money goes to Naxos town. “Apiranthos doesn’t make any money during the season, and look around you, even with our views, we don’t have a hotel, only a few rooms to rent.” He strolls me down to the museum of village life, past a small penned flock of goats, two of them lying odalisque style on a wooden table. The house is ordered and charming as only uninhabited houses are. Even in this village house on Naxos, the new ideal of the photograph shapes the arrangements inside, just as our idea of the beauty of a face is now the camera’s ideal, the photogenic face. Our eyes are used to conceiving the perfect interior as one about to be photographed, nothing spilled, smudged, disarranged, scattered. This “village” house mirrors the ideal; even though its furnishings have been painstakingly collected, it cannot really look like a village house looked. The kitchen especially has an unearthly order, with its earthenware pithoi for olive oil and wine neatly displayed, and its stunningly clean paddles for sliding bread into the oven. In the bedroom, a stefanothiki, a carved wooden box holding the imaginary couple’s wedding crowns, hangs on the wall, and a colorful embroidered hammock is slung between posts of the parents’ bed, so the mother could tend to it and rock it without having to get up—without a baby the arrangement seems ingenious. But none of the babies I know would be cooperative enough to accept this neat packaging. The house poses the mirror problem again—when do we see what we are looking at?

  “You must come again,” the museum proprietor says as I get into the car. “You can rent a room in my house. It is a museum.”

  “A museum of what?” I ask. “A museum of me,” he answers.

  I drive on, searching for the comfortably prosperous village of the man who is expecting me, whose name translates to Basil the Rifle, a name given to some ancestor, maybe because of good marksmanship, or the lucky acquisition of an impressive gun, or simply because of a reputation for bad temper. It is a mark of the enormous power of public opinion and community relations, and the martial force of Greek gossip, that in Greece so many people carry surnames their neighbors gave them, distinguished permanently by a moment of local reputation. No wonder there is a prayer against the evil eye, and that one of the striking features of the prayers I read on the ferry was the tense mistrust and suspicion of other people—it is a companion tradition to the tradition of Greek hospitality.

  The world of Naxos is of a different scale and color than bright, gemlike Thasos; Naxos is coppery, its vistas farther away from the viewer, as if you are there and not there at the same time. When I arrive at the village, Mr. Rifle, his three daughters, and their grandfather, all wearing high rubber boots, are making wine. Cascades of grapes are stacked against the wall. They have already trod the grapes, Mr. Rifle tells me, and now they are finishing the pressing by machine. He throws great shovelfuls of pressed grapes into the machine, while the three daughters, their eyes purple-black as grapes, ladle the juice from a well that catches the runoff into buckets. The oldest girl passes the buckets to their grandfather for barreling. “When you harvest grapes for wine,” Mr. Rifle says to me, “you are practicing a kind of agriculture in which time is as important an element as sun and soil. So I think it is not only practical, but a kind of gouri, a good luck talisman, to have three generations pressing the grapes together. How can my wine not be good to drink?” I sit on a stone wall and watch the family, this living votive image, making their wine, until Basil and Maria, his shy teenager, are ready to drive with me to the seaside village of Apollonas for lunch. In a field, a tiny newborn donkey looks like a toy animal, and we pass men riding sidesaddle on donkeys on the highway. Donkeys are still the most efficient way to reach farm plots cut out of sharp terraces, and rural Greece is crisscrossed with well-trafficked mule paths. When we reach Apollonas, we make the local pilgrimage to the gigantic kouros who has been lying on his back overlooking the rich blue sea since the sixth century B.C., when his maker seems to have judged him a failure and left him here. “Don’t you want to take a picture?” Basil asks me, and I hold out the notebook and pen I am carrying. “That’s your camera?” he says skeptically, and shrugs at my lost opportunity. But this is exactly the kind of tableau that makes me think that in Greece, the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is exactly reversed. The light and scenery seem to turn photographs into symbols, not even images, of a kind of general sublime; only words will make experience of being here specific—even glorious photographs seem to take on a curious embalmed quality here, where a word is worth a thousand pictures.

  We settle at a table overlooking the sea at a taverna called the Little Dolphin and eat local sheep’s cheese, the proprietress’s chicken in tomato and cinnamon sauce,
salad with tomatoes she takes me into her garden to pick, and wine from the barrel. Basil will not be happy until I abandon my knife and fork. He leans forward and says, “Do you know the saying?” I say I don’t know the saying. “Well,” he smiles, “the proverb says women and chicken both need to be picked up in the hands.” The proprietress is watching our glasses and brings us another carafe and more bread—I recognize this vigilance and custodial tenderness in her cooking, her well-tended garden, her well-tended clients. She looks to me to be one of those people who think their way into the world through a skill, who develop the personal excellence of a gift into a principle, a successful balance of herbs and meat leading to a carefully nurtured garden and animals, leading to nourishing people, leading to thoughts about conserving the fertility of the soil, and on to an awareness of the meaning of being a part of a community, all consequences maybe of experimenting with oregano and cinnamon. I wish we could do something less cold than paying her—give her a gift, something she wanted, not something she earned—but open admiration of her beautiful cooking and beautiful manners will have to serve. “We have always been famous on Naxos for our wine,” Basil says, taking an appreciative sip. “You know wine was discovered here by Dionysus? There is a story about how it happened, that everyone hears at some point, at any rate, any one who grows up here, though of course we have large emigrant communities, like all the Aegean islands—our mothers and grandmothers, the women of the islands, were the domestic servants, the baby nurses and child caretakers and seamstresses and cooks of the wealthy families on the mainland and in Asia Minor and Egypt. They would work for a family for a set number of years with the agreement that the family would then provide them with prika.”

  “Well, at least the prika part is over,” I say. Demanding and offering prika in exchange for marriage was made illegal in 1983, and if you look in a Greek glossy wedding magazine, under the cheerfully efficient checklist that in an American counterpart would be called something like “Wedding Do’s and Don’ts” (Do remember that the bride’s parents pay for the rehearsal dinner, etc.) you will find the admonition “Do remember that the dowry has been illegal since 1983.”