Dinner with Persephone

by Patricia Storace

  INDEPENDENCE DAY

  I wanted to be in Mani for Independence Day, since some of the most famous warlords who fought with their more or less private armies to harry the Turks out of Greece came from here; after independence was won, with so much Maniote blood, it was men from Mani who helped destabilize the new state by assassinating its first prime minister, in the pattern of Greek duality, fighting both for and against Greece.

  Peloponnesians, and people from Mani in particular, feel possessive about their role in the Greek uprising, so I wanted to see how the holiday felt there, and signed on for a week’s walk led by a talented mountaineer who is reputed to know every trail, hidden or public, in this part of the country. A few days before we set out, I went to the Museum of National History, a museum mostly devoted to the War of Independence.

  We set out on a cold and brilliant late-March morning, making our way to the small seaside town of Kardamyli by the usual patchwork method of bus, taxi, legs, and patience. We look as if we will be on schedule for our connections, but a long line of stilled buses and cars on the road to Kalamata brings our smooth progress to an end. Three police officers, having a lovely morning, saunter over to us from where they have been chatting and smoking, and tell us that the road is being dynamited this morning as a safeguard against rockfalls and landslides. It will take three minutes, they tell us, the famous tria lepta that are a sure sign that the time they are supposed to define and limit is completely fluid and anarchic. We settle in for a leisurely wait, some of the passengers getting out by the side of the road to smoke. There is the first of a series of crashes, as if monumental dishes were being dropped, and a very old man sitting across from me grins a gap-toothed grin, and says waggishly, “Mystras tumbled down,” referring to the crumbling ruins of the last outpost of the Byzantine Empire, which seem unsteadily stacked on their nearby hill, blocks that are the toys of historians. The passengers around him laugh at his joke, an applause he has orchestrated and accepts with pleasure; but when he sees my smile, he waves his hand toward me, and says, almost wonderingly, to the company at large, “She laughed.” The superb sensation of understanding and of being unexpectedly understood is just as fresh to me as it is to him, the miracle of our being intelligible to each other. We exchange greetings, and he notices that I am shivering a little and pulls his window farther up. Late March is full spring, but even here in southern Greece, it is also a month of downpours and a scorpion’s tail of cold. “I see you’re cold,” the old man says to me. “Well, March is a month with two faces. And do you know why? Because when all the months got married, March was the one who insisted on having two wives. So he married a Greek wife, but also a hanoumissa, a Turkish woman. The Greek wife was beautiful, but she was poor, and the Turkish woman was ugly, but very rich. So when March is spending time with the Greek woman, the day is fine, but there’s no profit in it; but when he spends time with the Turkish woman, the day is miserable, but rain pours down like silver coins, and makes the soil rich for the summer harvest.”

  As we drive into Kalamata, walls and telephone poles are plastered with handbills advertising a play called Mana … Mitera … Mama, three of the Greek words for mother. The central square is being readied for Independence Day celebrations—bunting in blue and white and Greek flags are being arranged, and microphones are being tested. A group of schoolboys wearing foustanellas begins rehearsing a klephtic ballad, one of the folk ballads about the Greeks who formed bands of both thieves and guerrilla warriors in the mountains during the Ottoman period. Although they are always patriotic heroes in the songs, the tradition of thievery was a serious problem for the new state, and even the countryside around Athens was notoriously dangerous, known for both robberies and kidnapping for ransom. From the square’s temporary bleachers, a solo voice sings a passage in the sinuous vinelike oriental scale of Greek folk music, and a British hiker leans forward and asks the leader of the group, “Is that a call to the mosque?” Along the road leading to Kardamyli, there are hotels and tavernas with names like the Sydney and the Melbourne, testimony to the double life of emigration. Bouquets of purple flowers grow out of cliff faces, and a cliff facing the coast forms a great gray wave, as if the mountains were commenting on the ocean. We clamber off at the central square and a bulky man sitting at the central kafeneio opposite ambles comfortably over to the car. Without greeting us, he reads our luggage labels, and examines over the leader’s shoulder the papers he is going through. He stares at each of our faces, and then saunters back to his table without a word.

  After lunch outdoors we walk up a mule path, its sharp twists forced on it by the terrain, toward the villages in the mountains behind Kardamyli. The spring in this harsh rocky countryside is so lavish that everywhere we walk, we walk through a surf of flowers, as if the waves of the sea had metamorphosed into blossoms. Silvery-white star-of-Bethlehem, asphodels, daisies, wild white and porphyry irises, red anemones: a generation of jeunes filles en fleur. On a plateau that makes a pocket-sized meadow, we disturb a new calf, which runs from us with horrified wide brown eyes, as if we were housebreakers. High on the mountain is a scattering of houses, one abandoned, with magnificent views to the back of the mountains and woods, and in front, a prospect of the sea, whose distance, uncontainability, and transformation of everything that encounters it, thought, light, color, make it seem like a figure for another world.

  Another house with a less definitive view has a turret, the defense turret of the old Mani houses, bullet-marked, and overmatched in height by a television antenna, that marks the house emblematically, like a modern caduceus. Sons in Mani families were referred to as “guns,” and the household architecture shows an expectation of life as a permanent state of war. The women, who lived helotlike lives, have the reputation, according to a number of my dream books, of being the most gifted dream interpreters on the mainland, as if their powers of divination had developed in proportion to the unfulfilled dreams that were their real lives.

  We emerge into a hidden village, so small it hardly has a square, but there is a tiny plaza, the equivalent of a public porch, shaded by a group of tall, burly plane trees, as imposing as wealthy landowners. Two middle-aged women, with handsome, determined faces, string long, curved green beans, laughing during their work with a keen-eyed older man, who sits on the benchlike rim of a marble fountain, his cane resting against it. “Health to the pallikaria,” they say, greeting the men, as we come up the path into the square. They have all been laughing at some story, and the blue-eyed woman says, “It’s the first afternoon we’ve had that has been warm enough to enjoy being outdoors. You are on vacation? From where?” We tell her, and she flings her arm out, gesturing beyond the square. “Have you ever seen flowers like we have here?” she wants to know. Paul, the group leader, is in love with a house on the ridge, and wants to know its status. They tell him the family who owns it is in Australia, and hardly ever visits, but still can’t stand the idea of selling the property with its angelic view. “Yes, but the view from Leigh Fermor’s house is even better,” the man with the cane says. “You must know that name, the Englishman who has written books about Greece and about his life on Crete as a guerrilla during the world war. The war made him a Greek. He wanted to live where he gambled with his life and won. That happens to certain soldiers. He loves it here—one spring I saw him dive into an acre full of daisies and poppies, face-down, and roll over and over in it.” The women drop their faces to their work; they look wistful. Two stocky little boys with the bodies of miniature men tear through the square, shooting imaginary rifles. “What are you shooting, Taki?” the gray-haired woman asks wryly. “Turks,” he shouts back, panting. “He’s Botsaris and I’m Kolokotronis.” “Well, come back here and rest when you’ve won the battle.” She winks at us. “These are the only two school-age children in this village,” she says. “The young families are in Athens, when they are not in Australia or America.” The boys come and sit down, and she cuts an apple into slices for them. “Do you know you
r poems for the twenty-fifth?” the man asks them, not looking at either of them, but keeping his face turned to the precious new spring sun. Taki holds his toy rifle across his chest and drives his poem out like a racing car. It is a toneless, breakneck recitation, common to Greek schoolchildren. Memorization plays a central role in Greek education, and speed is evidence of the perfection of the memorization; intonation and emphasis could be mistaken for hesitation. Teachers I have met tell me that on exams, Greek children are often supposed to reproduce whole pages of memorized text, down to punctuation; a misplaced comma will lower the grade. This boy hero of 1821 does his feat with the flash of an escaping fish, and Taki leans back, word-perfect, waiting for applause. “Bravo, Taki,” the villagers applaud, and so do the strangers. The elders tell the boys, “You are our heroes now. And tomorrow, you will be our heroes at the recital.”

  We walk on past a pair of graves covered with iron grilles that local myth has dubbed the graves of Castor and Pollux, and on to a private family church with a defensive bell tower, to which a story could be added every time a son was born. Evening is beginning to fall, and the cold challenging the warmth of the late afternoon with the extra pinch illness has if you are in the process of getting well. We begin the walk back to Kardamyli through ravines and valleys in the submarine green light of tree and shadow. In deep Mani, unlike here in outer Mani, Paul says, there are no trees to speak of, just sun, salt, thornbrush, and rock. We meet a man climbing to his house, and Paul asks about a monstrous building under construction on a high bluff overhead, that looks like the embryo of a supermarket or department store. “Sickening,” the man says, and tells us a story of bribery, code violations, and family betrayal, since the other members of the family sold this land to a developer while he himself was abroad. He speaks with the clearest diction of any Greek I have heard offstage—Greek is not a voluptuous language, or a lilting one, but stony and earthy, a language full of mud, volcanic rock, and glittering precious stones—this man speaks it with a consciousness of its long compound words and shifting accents, as if he is polishing a gem collection. He looks at the future hotel squatting on its bluff, puts his paper sack of eggs in his left hand, and takes his house key out of his pocket. “I am the last member of my family who will live on this land. The hotel will take my house too, in the end. I don’t know what we are supposed to think now about these places where we lived. They were hard to live in, but I can never forget how beautiful this place was to look at. They are still hard to live in, but looking at this tumor on the bluff makes me despair. Good evening to you.” It is strange to see this almost deliberate-seeming destructive ugliness here, as if the country resented the fact that its face is, to a large degree, its fortune. We walk on past covered springs, whose water flows under the faded remnants of icons painted on stone covers, casual evidence of the Greek struggle to make the natural and supernatural meet. As we come into sight of the water, the sea near us is clear, and far from us, is merged with a mist; one part can be seen with your eyes, and the other only with imagination.

  Some more walkers have arrived, a party of three British sailors, two men and a woman, who tells us that she has brought along a supply of true crime books in case she gets bored, and with cheerful sadism regales us at dinner with tales of severed body parts and ingenious police traps. As we make our way back to our rooms through the dark streets of the town, she begins to whistle Mozart arias, and I ask if she likes opera. It turns out that she doesn’t know the pretty fragments are from operas, but has picked them up from a TV show about a musical detective. “They’re lovely,” she says, “but my favorite song is still”—and she begins to sing, “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac.”

  In the early morning, the small main street where the bus stop is is already lined with chairs, and men are lounging in them with coffee and newspapers, as if the street were a porch. Nobody could come through the center of Kardamyli unobserved. The ruler of the bus stop is a blond boy of about eleven, a kind of Pickwick, the genial, expansive host of the bus stop, who handles the waiting passengers with relish, as someone older might enjoy a well-stocked wine cellar. He bounces up to me, and asks cheerful rapid questions: “What are you doing in Kardamyli? What bus are you waiting for?” He makes the rounds of the strangers, finishing with the three sailors. “You’re in the navy, too?” he asks the woman. “What do you do, sweep the ship?” “No,” she says, “I’m an engineer.”

  “I have a poem to say tomorrow for Independence Day. Do you want to hear it?” he asks, and shows me a scrap of lined paper with a penciled-in quatrain: “The mountains are joyous,/the castles are proud, because the Virgin Mary is celebrating,/and so is the country/When they see deacons with swords and priests with rifles.”

  “Bravo, Kostaki,” the storekeeper across the street calls out after the recitation. He is obviously the irrepressible darling of the town.

  While we are still waiting for our own bus, a fiftyish man with a leathery brown face and work clothes, nondescript trousers, and a short-sleeved maroon shirt approaches. He says, “I look for a girl to stay with me, to live in my house.” I say I have a job. He say, “Forget your job, your job is finished. In Greece, men only working. Woman sit down here. If I get you, women around here not supposed to work—you sit, I work. You want to come see the house? I live in a village in those hills, a small place. I would have a girl just for the summer if she wants. Maybe I find one for the summer, I find one for sure here. I got a house, you know, I don’t pay no rent.” He puts his foot on the curb proprietarily. The men in the sweater shop across the street sit in chairs on the sidewalk and listen, as if they are trying to guess whether or not he will succeed. The owner of the grocery store mixes himself a coffee in a glass, and hurries outside to take his seat at the drama. He leans over to another spectator, as if asking whether he’s missed anything worth hearing. I say I’m not interested, but the man proceeds, as if I am not a sentient being, with absolute disregard for my own response. “You pay no rent with me. You ever been in Chicago, Boston, New York? My older guy working in Boston.” He thrusts one leg out, lights a cigarette, and puts a hand on one hip. Along with his disinterest in a willing partner, it has never occurred to him that for a woman with any experience at all, the nuances and rhythms of a man’s conversation are a stunningly accurate guide to the way he makes love. “If you decide for me,” he says, “I’m here for another fifteen or twenty days more, then I go back to the waterfront, for a long time. And if not this summer, maybe next year you come back again. You live for free with me. You sit. If you come looking for me, my name is Antonis,” which in Greek pronunciation sounds exactly like Adonis.

  Unlike Aphrodite, I am glad to escape Adonis. The bus transports us to hill country, where we walk between the opposing towers of two clans, each with a family church. The Pantokrator, the portrait of Christ as ruler of all that is the focal point of the dome of Byzantine churches, is here surrounded by signs of the zodiac—a fine mermaid is circled by bright red fish, and the image of a man holding a gorgon’s head, with gorgons’ heads worked on his sleeves, looms up, the imagery reminding me of how the Maniotes had resisted attempts to convert them to Christianity, holding out until four centuries after the conversion in Ireland. The other site’s original church is not preserved, and the structure there now, by contrast to this one, has linoleum floors, and for an icon, a framed photograph of an image of the Archangel Michael, the military angel who oversees God’s legions. Outside, an invisible shepherdess’s voice orbits through the afternoon from a nearby valley, with that oriental dissonance that the Western ear hears as tragic, moving in great circulating sweeps up and down its scale, without ever finding a resolution, a new phrase implicit in every pause, both never-ending and never at peace.