Dinner with Persephone

by Patricia Storace

  “And our greatest modern novelist, Taktsis, who was murdered only a few years ago, was a transvestite—I’m sure you’ve read The Third Wedding Wreath.”

  I had read his remarkable novel, narrated by its women characters, which for many Greek readers is the consummate picture of post—civil war Greece, but I had not known how he was killed.

  “He was found naked in his bed, strangled, on a summer day in 1988. Most nights, his neighbors said, he would get in his car and drive to places that were gathering places for sexual buyers and sellers, and Taktsis would look over the possibilities. Witnesses said Taktsis had gone out three times that night, dressed in women’s clothes and wearing a blond wig. He came back three times, each with a different man. The third man killed him. He was described as well-dressed, of average height, and wearing a mustache. You can always rely on your neighbors in Greece to know what your lovers look like and when they visit you. I can guarantee you that yours do too. The police found the house torn apart, with a camera and a video missing, who knows why? In their reconstruction of the murder, they concluded the attack must have come as a surprise, since there were no signs of previous violence, and the police coroner said the killer strangled Taktsis with his right hand. Isn’t it strange that they can know the details of a murder down to the murderer’s hand, but never find the killer himself? In this small country, in the narrower circles of male prostitutes, no information was ever turned up. Strange, isn’t it?”

  Stamatis catches sight of a sloe-eyed man with thick dark hair, full lips, and the ideal body more often cultivated here by homosexuals. This ideal seems yet another variety of transvistism, since the mortal anatomy is supposed to cross-dress as marble, looking as much like a classical Greek statue as possible, and displaying the classical profile. “Ah, fors’ è lui,” Stamatis says, in Violetta’s Italian, and I can see he is impatient to move on. He gives me a card from an ornate period card case he is carrying, and tells me to call him if I feel like it, when I am in Athens between trips.

  When I get home, all the talk about the widow Mitsi makes me curious to look up the category of mothers in my dream books. Yiayias are in my modern dream books, a much idealized dream, in which you are advised to attend to her every word. But only one catalogues dreams of mothers, dreams in which the mother’s mood or physical health determines the outcome—if she is as she is in everyday life, it is good luck; if she is dead or sick, you will suffer grief, or be humiliated in some way. I turn to Artemidorus on mothers, where the dreams are stunningly different: “the case of one’s mother,” he writes, “is both complex and manifold.” The dreams are interpreted on the basis of the particular sexual positions the mother assumes during sex with the dreamer. In Artemidorus’s world, men dominate the world of dreams as they do the world of waking—each of these particular dreams presents the world as dreamed by a man. Artemidorus discusses first face-to-face intercourse between a dreamer and a living mother, delaying the interpretation of the same position practiced with a dead mother. This dream is bad for someone with a living father, but good for craftsmen, laborers, since a trade is like a mother, and demagogues and public figures, since a mother is a symbol of one’s country, and “just as a man who follows the precepts of Aphrodite when he makes love completely governs the body of his obedient and willing partner, the dreamer will control all the affairs of the city.” The view of lovemaking as a form of successful political domination of a submissive partner, and as a form of humiliation, is fascinating; dreaming of many different positions with a mother foreshadows bad outcomes, “for it is not right to insult one’s mother.” And so is the hierarchy of meanings assigned to the positions themselves, which, except for “missionary position” sex, are all the result of “wantonness, licentiousness, and intoxication …,” the worst of all being the mother performing fellatio on her son. As for the Christian dream books, there is not one scene of explicit sex in any of them; sex is entirely represented through a veil of symbols, like caves and columns, never through felt experience, its existence charging the world with hidden meanings, codes recognizable to initiates, but carefully hidden away, as if for protection from someone.

  CLEAN MONDAY

  Instead of flying kites and picnicking on Philopappos Hill, near the Acropolis, while the president of Greece strolls among the crowds, as is traditional for Athenians on Kathari Deftera, Clean Monday, the first day of Lent, I am going for the weekend to Hydra, which a friend has told me is the Greenwich Village of Greece, “bohemian, arty, full of discos and shipping families and vegetarian restaurants. But not Greece.” Still, I want to see this island, which has been repeatedly painted by modern Greek painters with much the same kind of erotic attention French impressionists felt for Provence. And besides, no matter where I have traveled in Greece, I have invariably been told that it either is not or is no longer Greece, as if there is an imaginary Greece that exists in perfect intact detail somewhere, much realer than the Greece we live in.

  The island, largely settled by Christian Albanians, is almost pure rock, its cliffs ruddy and nicked like the faces of men who spend their days working outdoors and impatiently cut themselves when they shave. The town itself looks like a stage set, the red-tiled houses artfully positioned in negotiation with the cliffs, so that the town is forced to have a visible foreground and clear recession into the distance, with a stage apron formed by the curving harbor; it is easy to see why painters love this island, with the radiant geometry of the houses, and the climactic harbor. I stroll through the many-leveled town, admiring blue iron railings wrought in the shape of enlaced anchors. The houses differ in details, with handsome, even playful entrances, brilliantly colored doors, brass door knockers in the shapes of women’s hands, some wearing rings and bracelets; but the buildings themselves are mostly variations on a theme, like domestic icons built to satisfy the strictures of some domestic theology. The steepness and rockiness of the setting they must be built in gives an intensity to the close gathering of the houses, helpless emblems of the compulsory intertwining of this community.

  A model in a striped summer dress and white flats leans against a railing on the harbor on this chilly day, while a photographer holds up a white hoop to test the light on her face. A makeup artist wearing a blond braid strokes her cheeks with blusher, while Greek boys settle like pigeons on steps to look at her. The makeup artist brushes the model’s hair as if she were a doll, and the model moves her head slowly from side to side, experimenting with smiles of different intensity. The photographer tells her to unbutton her skirt to show more leg, while more local boys and a man in a ship captain’s hat flock to the steps, smoking furiously and cupping their chins in their hands, attentive as ideal schoolboys, their legs splayed hopefully. The makeup artist strikes up a conversation with me, telling me about the Athens hotel she was booked in, a place she says where men wearing toupees rent rooms by the hour, and other men who hung out by the clerk’s desk offered her jobs teaching English, and pressured her to let them take her picture, a well-known kamaki trophy, the album full of alleged conquests to be shown to buddies, the snapshots often more important than sex. She went for a coffee with one, she says, who told her he was a university professor, and confided to her that he chose sexual partners from a pool of his female students. “I don’t pressure them,” he told her, “it is their choice. Of course if they imagine it will help their grades, that is a motive. But I say nothing.” When he made his offer to the makeup artist, she refused him, but he warned her, “You should choose a man soon, soon you will lose your beauty. I might marry you now, but in two years, I don’t think I would.”

  The dawn comes into Greece with the quality of lightning, suddenly there is absolute, unavoidable light. Roosters crow, a donkey sounds its anguished wheeze. I have been invited to a pretty seaside village for Kathari Deftera lunch, a meal which marks the beginning of meatless Lent and consists of fish salads like taramosalata, a special kind of flat bread studded with sesame baked only once a year on this da
y, and the rivers of wine, which anesthetize the fast. I set out to walk to the village, ascending above the mansions with lemon trees in their marble courtyards, climbing the steeply cut stone staircases, marked with a variety of animal droppings, donkey, cat, dog, and bird, behind Hydra town, which lead to the hill villages. Some women and children are setting a table on a flat roof looking out from the cliffs, feeling spring beginning. I walk through brilliant green terraces of farm and pasture land following a dirt lane; a donkey passes by with a man riding sidesaddle, his wife walking behind him, exactly like a nineteenth-century genre painting I remember from the national gallery. To the right there is a dreamily beautiful farm, in a green valley overlooking the blue Aegean, which is set behind an elaborate door and gate, as if the entrance led directly into a mansion instead of a tree-lined country lane; and to the left there are flocks of sheep grazing among starry clusters of periwinkle-colored flowers and endless oceans of clover, their bells sounding exactly like church bells, which gives a new concreteness to the Orthodox prelates’ reference to their congregation as flocks—the very local world of Mediterranean pastoral metamorphosed into Christian symbolism, the divine, like our dreams, made up of images we see around us day by day, images that change worship from place to place as dreams change reality. The path drops down to the fishing village just above the shore, past a stone bridge in the shape of a ruined rainbow. Men in sweaters are working on boats, painting and planing, sipping frappes, cold foamy coffee in glasses. One boat passes on the way to Hydra town, a dog standing poised on its prow like some old salt, the hero of a children’s story, his profile revealing a kind of canine filotimo, a proud sense of having mastered life at sea. I see my hosts already at a table overlooking the sea, with them a woman, and to my surprise, Lambros, the icon painter I met in Andros. He is painting some frescoes for their weekend house. The lady with the iron-gray cropped hair turns out to be another American, who tells me right away that Greece is her spiritual home, launching into a story about Knossos and how somewhere off the coast of Crete she is sure the lost testaments of Atlantis will be found, that we are on the verge. I reflect, not for the last time, that the romantic classicism which arrived here from the West has done this country little good, and settle down to hear the theology of the world underwater. At another table a fight breaks out between a little boy and his father, who hits him in the face. “You made me eat wood, you hit me,” the little boy complains, and the father pulls his head back like a disobedient dog’s and threatens him with more. The mother says nothing.

  Our conversation has turned to the war in Yugoslavia. Lambros says that he is appalled by the footage shot by Western television journalists, which makes the Serbs look like aggressors. “The Greek coverage will show you who the real victims are, the persecuted Orthodox of Serbia. The other stations that use the Western images give the impression the westerners want people to have. In any case, the Serbs are being hunted down because they don’t bow down to the interests of the foreigners who fomented this war,” he says. I have seen several stories about young Greek men volunteering for the Bosnian Serb army, to join battle in what they perceive as a religious war. “I know journalists who work for our own national television station,” Lambros tells me, “who have reliable information that these skirmishes you see are staged, who say that if you freeze and enlarge the pictures, you can clearly see the hands of the director at work. And as for Sarajevo, my same friend tells me that there is only very confined damage, and that the Western journalists simply shoot the same ruins again and again to give a false impression of devastation.” This, too, or variants of it, I have heard before; it is an article of faith in certain circles, believed in fiercely, like the doctrinally settled title Theotokos, God Bearer, given to the Virgin Mary, whose role as the mother of deity is emphasized here, it seems to me, even more than her virginity. Lambros wants someone to argue with him, but no one will. He says threateningly, “It isn’t fanaticism. It isn’t fanaticism. Orthodoxy is a stain that can never be removed from us by laundering. It is not a religion, it is a way of life, it comes from the depths of man’s soul.” The waiter brings another carafe of wine, and Lambros quiets, remarking that the sea reminds him of the Panagia. We drink the wine and eat mussels, looking out over the glittering water to a passage to the hidden open sea between the cliffs. The glory of the Greek landscape is how uncannily it seems to enact the processes of thought and perception it inspires, taking the eye on radiant, inconclusive pilgrimages. The bright cold spring sunshine fills the seawater full of orbiting stars flickering.

  AT COLONUS

  A philosopher is taking me on Cicero’s and Pausanius’s walk around the precincts of the Academy, where they recorded seeing the tombs of Pericles and other Athenian great men. I stop to buy a paper with a favorite cartoon strip, “The Wild Babies,” which today pokes fun at Greek dealings with God. The wild child wants good weather for the traditional kite flying on Kathari Deftera, and shouts into the sky, “Make the wind blow, re God, make the wind blow, re!” using re, a particle that conveys a certain coarse, even at times contemptuous, familiarity; re is something you aren’t to call your parents. The next drawing shows a downpour of rain drenching the child and his kite, and in the last frame, the child says, using a diminutive endearment, “Okay, Theouli mou, my dear little God, I get it! A thousand pardons for the re!” The child takes no account of one kind of disrespect, freely dictating to the deity, but concludes that God is upset to be called by the wrong title. He sees it not so much as a breach in his behavior, but as an insult to God’s filotimo.

  The Academy district is now a working-class neighborhood, mostly six- and eight-story apartment buildings, with a crushed little white house and garden occasionally to be seen on a corner, and some poignantly irreparable nineteenth-century neoclassical houses. With their unhinged wrought-iron gates and missing patches of wall covered with the last of their elegant terra-cotta ornaments, they have the air of nineteenth-century opera heroines maddened by unattainable love, like Lucia di Lammermoor. My friend points out to me what is thought to have been the garden of Epicurus—now a squat apartment building with underwear, blue jeans, and bath towels printed with jungle animals hanging from the laundry lines on the ascending balconies. We finish the walk at Colonus, the place where Oedipus entered the earth to die after Theseus granted him sanctuary. It is a park now, with lovely views of Mounts Parnis and Pendeli and the Tourkovounia, the Turkish mountains, as they are called. A handful of children are playing on a swing set, while a group of teenagers in leather jackets set off gunshot-sounding firecrackers that they have left over from the carnival celebrations. A boy of about six runs with a kite to the bench where his heavyset, black-clad grandmother is sitting, to harass her to climb to a higher point on the hill where the kite will fly more impressively. She doesn’t want to move from her perch, but he clambers onto her lap and kneels on her heavy thighs, putting his arms around her neck. He whispers and cajoles. She doesn’t smile and her eyes do not soften, but stare into his, with implacable acquiescence. He climbs down and pulls her along, like an earthbound kite. She breathes heavily as she follows him higher onto Oedipus’s hill at Colonus.

  SOUL SATURDAY

  An intense energy is exchanged between the living and the dead during the Lenten period before Easter, as if in some ways, the prescribed fasting is a kind of death for the living, making them clairvoyant, and narrowing the boundaries between them and the dead. Soul Saturday is a day especially devoted to the dead, when their graves are tended, and they are fed kollyva, the food of the dead. As I walk down heavily trafficked Hymettus Street to the Protonekrotafeio, where I collided when I first arrived with the funeral of the actress Jenny Karezi, I see an unusually heavy concentration of taxis. They are pulling up at the various gates, dropping some families off and picking others up. I walk to the entrance along one wall of the cemetery, staring up at a huge sign with the Playboy logo and the admonition to “Read Playboy every month,” and smelling over t
he gasoline fumes the strong perfume of incense wafting from inside. The flower shops outside the gate are doing substantial custom, and a beggar with a crutch stands sentry, asking all the entrants for money. I see no men in the crowd, just a cluster of women wearing black—the departing group are clutching plastic bags of trimmings from the newly pruned and cleaned grave greenery, and from some of the bags, silver edges of the trays on which the food of the dead was served gleam dully. As you enter the main gate, you have a clear view of the Parthenon, a sense of the strange logic of this country, this other world, ruled from here and from there by parallel sets of ghosts. The flower sellers inside the gate are offering bouquets of orange and yellow marigolds, branches of apple blossoms, white carnations. I buy a bunch of tongue-pink hyacinths. It would make me uncomfortable in the presence of people performing private rituals not to have some purpose of my own, so I decide I will walk until I find a grave that seems to call for remembrance; that way my wandering will not be prying, but a quest.

  I move through the rows flanked by masses of grave sculpture, a city of stone people. I pass busts of Balkan War soldiers with the generic sternly mustached face you see in sculpture and medallions and even photographs. Beyond is the shrinelike grave of Korais, the advocate of Katharevousa Greek, and a champion in Europe for the creation of the modern state. There is a life-sized sculpture of a girl student in uniform sitting at a worktable, a stele with a relief of a woman in ancient Greek dress clasping hands with a man in a modern suit, a life-sized sculpture of a man lying on his deathbed with two children sitting on either side of the bed. In some rows there is almost no greenery; in others palms and, more beautiful, orange trees covered with golden oranges grow out of the graves. Scattered throughout the cemetery, priests wearing colored silk embroidered stoles over their cassocks are chanting private memorial services. A woman in black stands at the foot of a grave, fork in hand, eating kollyva from a china plate, while another, dressed in unfamiliarly formal clothes, puts her hands on her hips to shift her tight girdle. On benches at intervals, impoverished-looking people are selling candles bound together in groups of three to symbolize the trinity. “Go in goodness,” a candle seller says to a man who lights them and puts them in a container at the foot of his family’s grave. On another bench, a woman is selling small paper bags of kollyva, for those who didn’t bring it from home. An old mavrofora, a black-clad woman with a black kerchief, sits facing her family grave, holding a burning candle, and staring. I am still looking for a grave that looks as if it needs my flowers. I pass a grave with a portrait bust of the woman it holds portrayed as the head of a sphinx, and another with a large goddess-sized sculpture, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence to which a color photograph is attached—an advertisement by the sculpture company, with its address, telephone number, and the name of the sculptor. Among the labyrinth of graves, I notice the memorial of a member of parliament, with a photograph of the man in a smiling pose, smoking a pipe, displayed in a stone casing on the grave. Directly on the marble slab some relative, perhaps, has placed a crystal bowl, with the real wooden pipe the man in the picture is smoking. I turn down an alley and see a tomb inscribed with one name in Roman script between a row of names in Greek script. When I go closer to see what this configuration means, I see it is the name of George Polk, the American journalist who was murdered in Thessaloniki in 1948, and whose cruel death caused so much suffering; an innocent man, experts on the case say, spent his life in prison for it, because the right-wing Greek government authorities and the Americans who backed them during the cold war were determined to assign the blame to a political scapegoat. I had seen the famous photograph of Polk’s body after it was recovered from the Thessaloniki harbor, openmouthed, limp as a scarecrow, a picture that forces you to imagine what it must have been like to realize, as he must have, that you were going to die this way. I leave my flowers here, to cover with some tenderness this untender death.