Dinner with Persephone

by Patricia Storace

  “Go to him?” I ask, weighing the possibility she is joking, because of her speech on the values of adversity. “Yes,” she says. “Go to him, like I did with my Elias—she should find him a good place to live, not something so uncomfortable as a dormitory, and when he has exams, she should be there to clean house and do his laundry and cook for him, and sharpen the pencils, so he can study more. Yes, Mimi doesn’t do what she should for the boy, she should go to him.”

  THE PLANETARKHIS

  “The ruler of the planet,” Greeks call the American president, and I spent much of election night in the ballroom of a hotel off Syngrou Avenue in Athens, an avenue that runs from the temple of Olympian Zeus to the sea that was made famous by a George Seferis poem: “When you let your heart and thought become one/with the blackish river that stretches, stiffens and goes away;/Break Ariadne’s thread and look!/The blue body of the mermaid,” which, although Syngrou Avenue is now most famous as the marketplace for Athenian transvestites, is still a stirring description of how it feels to find the sea at the edge of tangled Athens.

  The election night party is sponsored by the American embassy and the Hellenic-American chamber of commerce. In order to get into the ballroom, we must run a gauntlet of security checks, bags examined and bodies X-rayed as if we were boarding a plane. The crush is spectacular, some three thousand people are vying for breath here, since, the security man tells us, the two organizations failed to coordinate their RSVP lists. Inside, miniature Greek and American flags decorate the tables; the Republican table is watched over by a nearly life-sized poster of Dan Quayle; junior government ministers are working the crowds surrounded by burly bodyguards. The active anarchist organization “November 17” targets not only politicians, but prominent businessmen, so this crowd is dense with possible victims. “Wise men say only fools rush in,” sings the middle-aged bandleader, in the accents of the island of Kefallonia, “but I can’t help falling in love with you.” Greece has followed this election with the special intensity of a country which has a large population of Greek-Americans, often employees of American companies, or retired people who have returned to their birthplaces, who live and cast their votes from here. Greece’s absorption of American culture has a distinctive cast because American culture comes to Greece, not so much from the outside, but transmitted through relatives. The returning émigré, the taverna singer who risks her soul for a record contract with an American company, the attempt to arrange a marriage with an affluent American relative, all are staples of Greek literature, songs, and movies. I recently saw a comedy in which a young American woman on a ship was slapped onto a bed by a Greek man (which, in the film, she enjoyed, having at last encountered a real man), while the hero said, “At last, Greece on top of America.”

  The strong ties of the Greek and Greek-American communities, not to mention the presence of George Stephanopoulos at Clinton’s side, ensures that the major Greek television channels will provide all-night coverage and commentary. A panel of experts, including one of the Papandreou sons, who has just returned from a month at the Harvard School of International Affairs, is emphasizing the importance of the African-American vote. A usually impassive news anchor cannot conceal a small ironic smile when he translates Little Rock—Mikros Lithos—into Greek. “Who will be the new planetarkhis?” someone murmurs, helplessly changing vantage points in the throng, while cameramen and Greek TV reporters trample militantly over us. I am struck by the faces in the crowd, the difference between the appearance of the Americans and their Greek guests. The Greeks have a national face, features recur, there is a striking current of physical relationship alive between these faces and these bodies. The Americans have some common expressions, but rarely common features. When you see them in contrast to an ethnically related people, you realize how synthetic this nation is; under the coarse overhead lights, the group of people sitting behind the long Democratic Party table remind me of an Edward Hopper painting, with their patchwork of features and lack of physical resemblance, the wakeful look of people who must find ways and reasons to be together by choice.

  In the morning, the front-page photographs of Clinton in the papers share space with shots of Stephanopoulos, who will, if anything, dominate the news of the new administration for a time, as Greece reverts to a village in relation to him. His aunt from Evia is photographed leaving for America, with the hopeful text “Maybe she will bring us news”; and in the national style of Greece, his mother gives interviews to the glossy magazines to discuss her George. An editorial cartoon this morning shows a man in a foustanella holding a newspaper marked “Clinton’s promises” and warning his wife, who wears a classical tunic, with a Greek proverb, “When you hear about many cherries, bring just a small basket.” The wife replies, “I’m holding only a thimble.”

  LUST FOR A SAINT

  “Ti oraia mera, what a beautiful day,” echoes around me on this brilliantly sunny early November morning, on the island of Aegina, the feast of Saint Nektarios, which is the last truly out-of-doors feast until spring, and unofficially marks that we are now to perceive ourselves as entering fall and winter, even though I did swim just a day ago. The ceremonies for Nektarios go on all night, from about 5:00 P.M. the previous day, all-night vigils being a mark of spiritual merit here. People have already gotten up at dawn to kiss the saint’s tomb, and the bus on the way to the church has standing room only. I wedge in, just behind the driver. The passengers cross themselves, elaborating the cross three times as they pass the town cemetery. The men wear sprigs of basil in their buttonholes, a common sight on Greek Orthodox feast days. The monastery is built on one of those hills whose overhang makes the roads of island Greece so narrow. A small homely taverna faces it—the site asks for a building that will live within the folds of this land that looks like dough kneaded by a god, while the walls should be of some earth color that will not argue with the lion-colored landscape. Instead, the furious and distinctively retroactive Greek ambition came into play, and the architect apparently attempted to copy Istanbul’s Saint Sofia; Agios Nektarios is still unfinished, but the driver tells me that it is nevertheless the largest church in Greece. The walls are a garish orangey-yellow, windows outlined in red, and the building sits bulbously on its site like a raw onion someone tossed on the ground realizing it had a bad center. The taverna across the way is filled with people drinking beers on the outdoor veranda, having completed their obligations to the saint. “Khronia polla, many years to you,” says the policeman directing traffic, greeting us with the standard Greek festival wish. A golden crozier rests on the ledge under one car’s rear windshield. People are thronging the parking lot and the path spiraling up to the monastery entrance, dressed in various styles. One woman is wearing a sequin-covered jacket and brocade skirt, as if she had just come from a nightclub. And there are clusters of either widows or pious women wearing black dresses, scarves, and stockings. There are no little black dresses in Greece; it is not the same color as in Paris or New York, where its purpose is to give a sculptural line to the body. In the Byzantine world these women’s ideas of clothes descend from, rich colors were the privileges of the royal and the wealthy—black, which did not show stains or dirt, was the cloth of those without status, the abased, likely to do dirty work, and unable to pay for the service of maintaining stain-free clothes, which must have been a mighty labor, as you can see from catching occasional glimpses in the countryside of women doing laundry in rivers. That white should have been the baptismal color is not evidence of universal abstract symbolism, but of recognition of the sheer physical difficulty of keeping it clean.

  The crowd is of all ages, although teenagers are the least represented, and the elderly dominate. But there are parents with young children in their arms, some young couples, some mothers with ten- and eleven-year-olds. There are also the political pilgrims, high-ranking military officials, well-dressed women and men in suits, whose hairstyles and publicly graceful carriage show them used to leading processions and being photo
graphed as they are led into the monastery through a separate entrance from the crowds that the police herd through the narrow main entrance. Streamers striped in Greek blue and white and Greek flags flutter in the breeze, and booths are set up at the foot of the huge monastery. One sells dolls hanging from their curly blond hair off ropes crisscrossing the booth, pacifiers in their mouths. Other booths hawk radios and cameras, coarse cut-glass vases, round trays of halva and baklava scored into individual pieces. You can hear the amplified singing of the liturgy all the way down in the parking lot. On the path up to the monastery, people are sitting on the ground, their crutches beside them, while pilgrims who are obviously mentally troubled are led up the paths by brothers, sisters, or parents. This practice is a living demonstration of a Greek idiom for madness, dating at least from the Byzantine era, “He is for the panegyri,” when the mentally ill were brought to medieval fairs probably very much like this one, in hopes of a magical cure. A man who is bearded and dirty, with a heroically stony hermit’s face, sits on a portable stool—I overhear him telling a schoolteacher who has paused to talk with him that he spends his life going from panegyri to panegyri; as the teacher descends the path, the old man calls out, “Many years to you, Mr. Teacher, Mr. Teacher and Catechumen.” Just before the monastery entrance a woman is camped, selling candles, incense, and evil-eye charms.

  The line to go into the church, the special goal being to kiss Nektarios’s tomb, is enormous, at least an hour and a half’s wait. I catch phrases from the Sermon on the Mount, powerfully loud, but violently garbled by the audio system. In the liturgy, people hunger and thirst, people are meek. In this least selfless of crowds, however, I am the closest thing available to someone meek. With an instinct for creating suffering where none needs to exist, and then exalting it, the crowd pushes, shoves, stamps on, and makes all its members as uncomfortable and claustrophobic as possible. Old ladies aggressively push each other back and forth, and every time there is a tiny movement ahead, there is a violent surge in the crowd, nearly knocking people off their feet. When I reach the entrance to the monastery church itself, decorated with palm fronds, bouquets of carnations wrapped in foil, and a plastic Greek flag, I am nearly pushed down the stairs, falling apologetically onto a woman in front of me. She is holding a foil-wrapped bottle of olive oil as an offering to the saint, who needs an ample supply for the hundreds of gilt lamps that drop tears of light from the ceilings of his church. If anyone fell or felt sick, he would be trampled, and any accident under these circumstances would produce an enormous death toll. Once we are inside, the crowd becomes even more frantic, obdurately trampling on each other in order to snatch lustfully at the holy bread a priest is handing out, to lay flowers and money on Nektarios’s tomb, and to kiss the tomb as passionately as if it were a husband. I smell that off-key smell of singed cloth, and put out the beginnings of a fire lit by a pilgrim’s candle on the elbow of my sweater. I walk off, picking hot wax off the wool. Auto-da-fé, actus de fides, an act done from faith.

  A NYMPH’S TEMPLE

  “You bitch, you betrayed C. C. Capwell!” I hear as I set out for the Aegina harbor from the house of the brilliant poet where I am a guest. She is one of the world’s great talkers, a coloratura teller of jokes in many languages, and the only true mystic I have ever known, since her mysticism emerges from a sense that the divine is unknowable, and is uncorrupted by the secret certainties of underlying dogmatism that make so many mystics seem like spiritual pornographers, covering with a transparent black negligee an anatomy they know in advance is naked. She is also a connoisseur of soap operas, and rails joyfully in Spanish, French, Greek, Russian, and English, against whoever plots against her preferred characters, such as C. C. Capwell.

  All along the way to the harbor, I am congratulated with golden smiles on the election of Clinton. “It is good for the world that you have such a clever, sincere, youthful president,” someone says to me. I stop for a coffee, which comes accompanied by paper sugar packets stamped with images of Delphi and the theater at Epidaurus. Moored at the harbor’s edge are rows of cleanly painted blue-and-white boats, some with the general talismanic names of Greek boats, Tria Adelphia, Three Brothers, Zoodokhos Pygi, Life-Giving Spring, named after the icon of the Virgin Mary sitting in her fountain, and Agios Nikolaos, after the patron saint of sailors. Local names crop up too, like Agios Nektarios, and Aphaia, the daughter of Zeus, whose temple I am going to visit today. I can’t find my waiter, preoccupied probably with the late coffee-and-newspaper crowd, so I go inside to see if I can order a spinach pie to go with my coffee. A thin, flat-faced man gets up from behind the bar. Is anyone cooking yet, I ask, but he only looks alarmed. I try English and nothing happens. “Alvanos,” he says, only Albanian, and I see he has the starved look Albanians here don’t seem to lose, even when they gain weight, the eyes that meet yours as a fish’s would, observant, but without creating a human link. The lives of deprivation and violence Albanians live in Albania—Tirana is said to be ruled by gangs who thrive off petty theft and murders—and the mistrust with which they are regarded here, seen as importing criminality across the border, have created this distinctive expressionless look. I thank him, catching sight of a poster behind him of Clark Gable carrying off Vivian Leigh in Osa Pernei o Anemos, and head for the bus to Aphaia’s temple.

  The stationmaster is playing cards, but breaks off his game to wave me toward a bus with two pairs of huge eyes painted on the right- and left-hand sides of its windshield. A few people are on the bus, a handful of schoolkids, some old ladies in black with town marketing, an old man with the unwieldy materials for some carpentry project. The driver puts a small boy down at a field across from a tiny school no bigger than a mountain chapel. A girl of about twelve is sitting behind the driver, who talks and laughs with her. When she steps off the bus at her stop, the driver remembers he had a favor to ask her. He calls out to her, reaching down between his feet, and hands her a carton of eggs, saying, “Wait just a minute, my golden one. Would you please drop these off with my wife?” We drive through groves of pistachio trees with their childlike scale, Aegina’s chief crop, along the steep narrow roads island geography compels. Near the temple, there is a passage so narrow that cars can only go single file, and eight cars retrace their passage back downhill to give the bus the right-of-way.

  Pine trees frame this temple of Zeus’s daughter, their blue-gray cones hanging from their branches like votive offerings. A woman is feeding a small colony of hens and roosters at the foot of the temple. My entrance fee is waved aside in President Clinton’s honor. It is a mark of the change of seasons that the tourists today, except for me, are all Greek. “Mama,” shouts a little boy, racing ahead, “can we go inside the temple?” The chance to linger and circulate, rare at temples during the high tourist season, tempts me to think about what makes this temple seem so brilliantly sited. Height is important—you must have the sense of revelation that height gives to the religious, the sense that you have arrived as a pilgrim at a place where many perspectives meet, where you can come close to seeing everything. Sound is equally important, at every temple site I have visited. A rarefied silence, broken by the powerful secret language of the winds in the pine trees, as there is here, or the grand recitations of the waters, as at the site on Thasos. The gods must always speak at a temple site, in sounds we can hear but not understand, sounds we can only interpret. And finally there must be a sense not only of revelation in the site, but of mystery, of continuation into places you can’t see, into unknown worlds. Here the waters of the narrow Saronic Gulf move beyond the mountains of Aegina, between them and the Greek mainland to a destination you can’t see; blue water and light stretch to infinity, as soundless boats sail past, backed by immovable cliffs that look like temples themselves, pieces of divine design. This is a place that makes the world seem like a dream, a real world that is also a dream of itself.

  A mother and two children who are highly amused with themselves stop to talk to me. “We just jaunte
d over for the day from Piraeus. I left my husband a note to tell him we would be in Aegina, I just left him a note, American style, American style,” the wife says delightedly. The little girl is hungry, so I give her an apple, as she prattles about the horse-drawn carriages on the harbor, pretty little pastiche hansoms, pulled by horses whose bridles are garlanded with flowers, and who look a bit like modern actresses attempting nineteenth-century costumes. In the evening in the streets behind the port you can see them going home to their drivers’ small pastures, no longer public, but private horses. The little girl’s ambition is to ride in one, just like a blond actress named Aliki, “our national star, i ethniki mas star,” in her movie called Holiday in Aegina. The little boy, wearing the comically adult-looking glasses of Greek children, is cheerfully restless. He darts over and hugs his mother, then rushes off again to dangle from a tree. His mother calls out patiently, “Get down, Bobbi,” but he changes his name in midair. “I’m not Bobbis,” he says, “I’m Archimedes, I’m Archimedes.”

  On my way back to Aegina town, I have quite a lot of trouble not getting married in one village, where a lonely taverna keeper announces that he, after years of bachelorhood, may very well be interested in getting married, and has fixed on me as his choice. Having disentangled myself, I am followed through the village by a man on a motorcycle, who says to me, “Here’s what I want to do. Let’s go for a ride in the mountains and see the scenery and then have sex.” I explain I have a desmos, a bond elsewhere, and he says, “What, a husband?” No, I say. “Then why not have two? Look how handsome I am,” he says, running his hands over his torso. “Don’t you find me handsome?” he asks, with the uncanny sophistic skill of the Greek kamaki, or harpoon, as these boys are called, for asking questions whose answers can only be interpreted as either insults or assents, and used to achieve the desired result. I walk away from him through the village and take a stand at the bus stop, trying not to laugh, because I am remembering a folk song about the klephts, the idolized Greek bandits, who harried the Ottoman Turks when they were good and harried the Greeks when they weren’t. “The klephts are sitting, sitting beneath the plane tree./They wash, they groom themselves, and look at themselves in the mirror./They observe their fine features, they observe their gallantry./Demos takes one look, the pallikaria five, and Kostas the proud looks fifteen times./And out of his pride and out of his gallantry/he doesn’t go home in the evening, he doesn’t go back to his family,/but stayed up in the mountains and high ridges.”