Dinner with Persephone

by Patricia Storace

  Shattered bricks, broken concrete, fragments of glass, and iron pipes big enough for people to hide in block the entrance of the luxury hotel where the wedding reception for a publisher’s daughter and a shipping tycoon’s son is being held. The heels of my gold evening slippers sink into the quicksand of the street debris after the taxi lets me out across the highway from the hotel. A small party of explorers has formed from a fragment of the thirteen hundred invited guests to make an attempt to find the hotel entrance, which was hidden by the litter of construction materials. A chauffeured Mercedes discharges another group of elegantly dressed lost people. Someone sights a way in, and reports to the band of searchers, who follow him following a child in a silver satin flower girl dress, down two flights of escalators, past posted security guards, and through the receiving line. Waiters hover with glasses of champagne; the guests are symmetrically divided by gender. On one side of the room, a fortress of black-suited men smoke and transact; on the other, women whose hair has been braided and souffléed by craftspersons who obviously have a taste for baroque fountains wear brocades and sequins that are eerily like the festival ceremonial robes of priests, which in Greece are glittering landscapes of gold thread, jewels, and brocade. Huge bars, surrounded by guests, anchor the room, and the entire length of the far wall, which I estimate to be a quarter of a mile long, is lined with linked buffet tables. Monumental floral arrangements, which include tags at their bases with the name and telephone number of the florist, are placed like perishable sculptures at the corners of the dance floor. In the middle of the dance floor, as if on an altar, is a nine-tiered cake, roughly eight feet tall.

  The weddings of wealthy Greeks are extraordinarily drawn-out affairs, since time is made between ceremony and reception for the wedding party and guests to change from their grand church clothes to grand evening clothes. And since the ceremony itself proceeds at a stately pace, with the repetitive chanting and actions performed in the triple patterns that are emblems of eternity here, a wedding can be an all-day business. For this and for other reasons, my friend Aura doesn’t want to drive out to the green glade of Agia Filothei, probably the most popular wedding church in Athens, booked months in advance. “I simply cannot feel comfortable listening to a ceremony which is founded on an insistence that women are inferior to men. I don’t even like to say I am married in Greek. I am happy to say it in French or in English, but in Greek, I feel the twinge of etymology—pandremeni, married, descends from the ancient Greek ip-andros, to be under a man, to be subject to him. So in Greek, I can’t be married, since I don’t agree to this. But you go—it is a marvelous opportunity for you to observe the precise moment when social ideology is transformed, by the alchemy of the liturgy, into divine commandment.”

  I am struck, as Aura promised, by the almost badgering emphasis on the wife’s secondary position, both with her husband and in creation itself, the constant admonition that she must obey her husband in all things, that he is her head. As the bride and groom stand at the altar, both wearing wreaths of small white flowers that are linked together by a satin ribbon, as if it is a new umbilical cord, the groom is exhorted to love his wife as if she were his own body, and the bride to fear the man, to stand in awe and even in dread of him, at which point this bride stamps firmly on her groom’s foot, in a traditional gesture of defiance. An image of an old embroidered wedding coverlet I saw on a visit to Crete with Kostas makes me momentarily lose the thread of the ceremony.

  The quilt was bordered with square after square of tiny churches embroidered in colored thread; they proceeded inexorably as armored tanks around the bedcover. I could tell from his face that the aggressive coverlet made Kostas nervous, with its endless triumphant repetition that legitimate marriage had been achieved. The power hidden in those toylike churches declared that lovemaking in this bed might have been, without this quilt, romantic adventure, but was now, for good or ill, destiny. Kostas had joked about the admonition in the marriage service to woman to fear the man; “They don’t have to warn us to fear the woman, you see; it goes without saying.” But no matter who fears whom, I thought, this moment introduces a power struggle into the very heart of a ceremony that should celebrate the mutual love and mutual respect of the partners. And as I watch the bride and groom make their ritual three circles around the altar while we pelt them with rose petals, sugared almonds, and rice, I realize that, for me, the strangest element of the ceremony was that no pledges were made by the bride and groom, who do not speak. Our ceremony is based on the asking and answering of questions, this one on exhortation. It occurs to me on the way to the reception that the absence of questions may reflect the tradition of arranged marriage here, evading the issue of the bride’s and groom’s consent.

  At the hotel, I catch sight of the friends I am meeting, and join their table while we wait for the bride and groom to make their entrance. Two Americans who introduce themselves as Tweedledum and Tweedledee sit down with us; Dum looks like an expensively dressed Woody Allen; he wears a costly gold watch, and carefully chosen Italian glasses, which magnify his tiny dead eyes, the eyes of a flesh-eating fish, with neither scruple nor bitterness over lack of scruple, eyes in which nothing is left but will. Dee is a particularly late-twentieth-century American character, with a boyish face achieved as if through a kind of plastic surgery of the soul: he is an artist whose art has been to create an audience and sustain his own celebrity, specializing in pornographic pictures of himself with his wife. He tells me he lives part of the year in Munich, and I ask why. “Because the sex is good in Munich,” he answers. “Did you hear what I just told her?” He nudges Dum. “I told her I live in Munich because the sex is better there.” Dum nods with distracted admiration and beckons for another glass of champagne. “It’s very fertile in Munich,” Dee says. “Even the cows are dripping with milk. That’s why the sex is so good. In Africa, the cows are dry and bony, but in Munich they are fat and luscious and full of milk.” He nudges Dum again. “Did you hear what I just said? About the cows in Munich?” He urges me to go to an exhibition of his work in Athens. “You’ll really be surprised. Just go. I promise, you’ll get a big surprise.”

  Suddenly the strains of Mendelssohn’s wedding recessional, in an arrangement so dictatorial and pompous that it sounds like the music radios play after military coups, strike up. The bride and groom walk on a white carpet through the throng to the cake—the groom is stalwartly dark and handsome, and solicitous of the bride, like a danseur presenting the prima. She is wearing the most artful dress I have ever seen, arranged on a series of wire hoops, covered with net studded with brilliants. It looks as if she is dressed in galaxies, stars draping her breasts and bare rich shoulders. Dee leans over to Dum. “Do you think Romeo fitted the dress himself?” Dum replies, as the couple cut the cake in every kind of photograph, and begin to do the work of their wedding, moving around the room. “If he knows how important Ari is in the art world, he must have knelt at her feet with pins stuck through his tongue.”

  On both sides of the room waiters wheel up rounds of ice six feet in circumference, some holding beds of oysters, others bottles of vodka and aquavit; waiters circulate with trays of caviar on toast. Every luxury from other climates and other countries that is most unattainable in Greece is offered. The room breaks up into different pareas, close-knit circles—the tycoon’s parea, the grandparents’ parea, the parea from Athens College, the most prestigious school of Greece, which routinely turns out not only future prime ministers but future opposition leaders. A band begins to play: “I like to be in America, everything free in America,” sings the leader, moving on to an Elton John song, and some Latin numbers, popular for dancing here. Quadrilingual buffet tables begin to function, offering smoked salmon, pâté, tender rare beef, almost impossible to find in Greece, asparagus—not one Greek dish or wine is offered, although the scene calls up images of the outsized festal cooking equipment, vast cauldrons and enormous trays used for public celebrations that I have seen in some vill
ages. Ari, I think, is feasting the village. There are no toasts, no speeches; the whole occasion is the display of abundance, which seems all at once heroically generous, aggressive, and panic-stricken. Even the koufeta, the sugared almonds given as favors at Near and Middle Eastern weddings, are not wrapped in the usual tulle and satin ribbon here, but offered in monogrammed crystal boxes.

  When we leave, the dance floor is crowded; many of the dancers are mouthing the English words to the tune the band is playing: “This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York island …” In Athens, they are dancing at lavish weddings to American protest songs from the Depression.

  POMEGRANATES

  As Christmas, or I should say New Year’s, approaches—since Protokhronia is more like our Christmas celebration, and Christmas is a foreign fruit grafted on the Greek tree—the small, cell-like empty storefronts in my neighborhood, which are inhabited only by perpetually renewed populations of wild kittens, old cardboard boxes, and stray wine bottles, turn into magical chambers glittering with Christmas ornaments. The street cats are an insoluble Greek problem, since the Greeks disapprove of sterilizing animals—I heard a distinguished teacher of mine, educated at the Sorbonne, and known throughout Athens for the skill and imagination with which she teaches this difficult language, agonizing with her father over the decision to sterilize a beloved male cat named Achilles. Her apartment was at that point overrun with Achilles’s children, who barely left a corner for her, but her father pleaded with her, “Don’t ruin him.” The alternative, though, is this, streets full of hungry, scavenging stray animals breeding new stray animals, who are often given poisoned food, or killed in other ways, or driven, like the storefront kittens, to some unnameable elsewhere.

  I am glad to be walking outside, since I am always cold in my apartment. This is not a severe winter in southern Greece, although northern Greek villages are snowed in; but southern Greek houses are sensibly built to capture as much cool air as possible against the summer heat, and mine is very successful. And in my building, as is common, the heat is only turned on three times a day, so I shiver indoors and sleep in an embryonic tuck. I stop to look at the gift book offerings for children in a shop window—it features a book displayed in many windows and catalogues this year: I, Alexander: King of Macedonia, Son of Zeus, Conqueror of the World. The cover is in lurid blood and earth colors, and shows Alexander in girlish-boyish beauty, a reddish fringe of beard contrasting with his blond curls, perhaps to make his sex less ambiguous, his eyes staring with furious determination. A label is fixed to the book, a breathlessly worded reminder that a free poster of Alexander of Macedonia comes with each book.

  I go in, to buy a translation of Little Women (Mikres Kyries) for a friend’s daughter, and leaf through it, relishing the Greek version. Amy, accused of being an affected niminy-piminy chit in American, in Greek is criticized for her use of high-toned Katharevousa words. The saleswoman asks, “Is it a gift?” and when I say yes, wraps it with genius. It is something that moves me about life here, this love of anything to do with gifts—you are invariably asked when you make a purchase here if it is a gift, and it will be wrapped in glory if it is, with a characteristic “second gift” fastened to the package—a wand with a tiny gold rose, an evil-eye charm, a tiny ship. My package is fastened with a tiny ceramic pomegranate, the key image of this season here, and a measure of the emotional difference between the Eastern and Western holidays. The fruit sellers at the farmer’s markets display pomegranates dyed gold on their tables, along with branches of gold- and silver-dyed leaves. Flower sellers offer pomegranates wrapped in silver foil for you to smash against your threshold with all your force on New Year’s Eve, to spread the seeds of good luck, and to have an abundant year, and gift shop tables are covered with brilliant red candles in the shape of pomegranates. In jewelry shop windows, there are pomegranate-shaped pendants, and silver pomegranates to give as gifts, cast open to show their abundant silver seeds. Again, I am reminded that the world of the unconscious is different here than in Scandinavia, in Mexico, in Benin, as is the imagery of daily life that we take with us into our dreams and bring back with us transformed, to change the world of reality.

  Modern Greek dream books always catalogue pomegranate dreams, as Artemidorus did in the second century. And other divinities are present at this feast which now celebrates the birth of the baby boy Christian god: the pomegranate is a symbol of the promise that the Queen of the Dead will return to earth, bringing spring with her, before she retreats again into the underworld. Persephone’s pomegranate means nothing in the West as a mark of this season, but in this part of the world the pomegranate has a long history as a charm that mediates between life and death. In Egypt, a wall painting of Pharaoh Seti, the father of Rameses II, shows him offering to Osiris, the first god of the Egyptian pantheon to die and return to life, a tray holding bread, wine, and pomegranates. Here of course, the pomegranate is the fruit of Persephone, or at least, I realize, in this dual-natured country, half of it is. The other half belongs to Hades, since this fruit is also the King of the Dead’s, which he offers in order to ensure that she will remain with him in the kingdom of the dead—the pomegranate is a fruit neither of death nor life, but of the inseparability of the two. And perhaps, in a way impossible to document, since the art of myth is in part the art of shredding documents, the pomegranate came to memorialize the end of women’s sharing in divinity, which the various monotheisms chose to personify as exclusively male. Perhaps Demeter mourns, in the form of her daughter assigned to the underworld, her own lost publicly acknowledged divinity—the ambiguous figure of Mary reflects this loss, an underground divinity, with the constant official assertion that she is not a goddess, and the constant private invocation of her in popular worship. Or perhaps not, depending on which six seeds preoccupy you, the six Persephone ate or the six she did not. Myths are malleable, molded utterly by how we interpret them, unlike literature, with its changing but indissoluble links to history and to social life.

  The dream pomegranate of both the Greeks of antiquity and the modern Greeks is an ambiguous fruit. It is not a good omen for Artemidorus, meaning “wounds because of their color, tortures because of their prickles, slavery and submission because of the Eleusinian legend.” The modern dream books differ—some foretell, for those who see pomegranates in their sleep, charming and pleasant erotic adventures, because it is a symbol of the return of spring and fertility. Others interpret it as a symbol of danger, that if you see someone offer you a pomegranate, it is a sign that your life is in danger, that some underworld force may be reaching out to seize you, as Hades did Persephone. One says that an open or broken pomegranate foretells wealth, but without joy, and that a pomegranate full of seeds foretells a powerful love that will not end in marriage. But the modern dream books, even when they present a pomegranate as a sign of warning, present this old dream as a symbol of a new reality—the idea of an erotic relationship, the idea of an erotic marriage, the idea of erotic choice, militantly discouraged for both men and women under the system of arranged marriage and profound social and professional segregation in place in Greece until recently. The pomegranate may foretell relationships that fail, or charming adventures, but either way it suggests the existence both of erotic pleasure and erotic married love inconceivable under the old system. There are dreams that change, and the world changes with them; the world changes, and the dreams the old world inspired become untranslatable.

  I walk on to Plaka, the old quarter, lovely without tourists as I’ve never seen it, on a chilly winter day, with its trees studded with bright flame-colored Clementines, thinking about the pomegranates, about the irony of the presence of the old gods at the feast of a god whose champions tried to destroy them. I pass a demonstration by a group holding a huge red banner and chanting—this one seems to be against fascism, but I don’t stay to find out who they are, because there seem to be as many police as there are demonstrators, and I am aware now of their n
otorious readiness to “make you eat wood,” in the Greek idiom for beating. I stop at a magazine stand to look at the holiday issues—the cooking pages of the women’s magazines are a regular anthology of EEC country recipes and customs, bûche de Noël, Christmas pudding, pfeffernusse. New images in Greek eyes, the primitive beginnings of new dreams. One of them reprints a twentieth-century classic, a popular Christmas story called “Christmas at Missolonghi,” by a woman who virtually invented children’s literature in this country, Penelope Delta, the daughter of the extraordinarily wealthy Emmanuel Benaki, whose cotton-based fortune is enshrined in monuments like the famous Benaki Museum in central Athens, and Benaki Hall, at the Athens College preparatory school.

  I buy the magazine, curious about the story, and turn around at a tug on my arm to see Eleftheria, a girl I run into from time to time at my gym, when I go for a workout and a steam in the hamam, as the steam baths here are called. She shows off a pair of Versace leather trousers she found on sale while visiting her Marine boyfriend in the States. “Four women cursed me on the way down here today,” she says proudly. “I think my new pants must look nice. You know how it works here, half of the people are going ‘Ftou, ftou, may the evil eye not see you,’ and the other half are going ‘Katara mou, you have my curse for all eternity.’ ” We walk together out of Plaka, while Eleftheria riffles through my magazine, discoursing like a wine connoisseur on the qualities of Lancâme, Estée Lauder, Cover Girl, and Chanel makeups. She shows me a new palette of eye shadows she got for her name day last week. “Saint Eleftherios—Saint Freedom, Saint Deliverance—the patron saint of pregnant women and of prisoners.” She smiles. “If you go to a maternity hospital, you will see his icon everywhere, and when you make a wish for a pregnant woman, you wish her a good liberation.” We wander toward Hermes Street, a name that reflects the neoclassicism of the new Greek state—in both substantial and provincial towns, the major commercial street will often be called after Hermes, the ancient patron god of commerce, reflecting the determination to revive a consciousness of ancient Greece, to regain a place in Europe through classicism, eluding the impossibility of being reintegrated through the awkward symbols of Byzantium: Byzantium and western Europe had, after all, evolved into political and religious enemies; the Greek Orthodox prayer book has a special prayer for a ceremony marking the return to Orthodoxy from the errors of Roman Catholicism, a circumstance that periodic control of Greek territory by Catholic powers, and the frequent education of Greek boys in Roman Catholic schools and universities, must have created often.