Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  This is a story, and Suzanne is in it. I am glad she is not the Suzanne of that song. If she had been, she would not have provided me with nearly so much rich material. One Greek neighbor’s nickname for her is I Pendámorphi, “the five-times beautiful one,” which is how Greeks refer to the Beauty in the tale of Beauty and the Beast. Just to complicate matters, in The Spice-Box of Earth, which he published long before he met his future mate, L. has a poem titled “The Sleeping Beauty” that contains the lines:

  “You don’t understand what story I am from,”

  she said,

  “we both know who lives in this garden.”

  To this day, nobody understands what story/anecdote/song/ myth Suzanne is from, but we all know who lives in L.’s garden.

  SELF: “I haven’t set eyes on Suzanne yet. I haven’t seen her in the garden.”

  EVANGELIA: “You wouldn’t see her. She’s like a part of the garden. She’s like a locust among the leaves. Not like me— big and shouting ‘Hello!’”

  Maybe she is Kassandra, opening wide her saucer eyes and murmuring her unheeded truths. Kassandra to L.’s wolf, forever cutting short the prologue with her cries of “Woe!”

  Once Suzanne hung “a phantasm with horns” on the door of the children’s bedroom. Evangelia took it down, saying it was not good for the children. But Suzanne berated her and put it back up.

  Scene: the Hydranet office, where David presides over computers that are supposed, like Rumpelstiltskin, to spin gold out of straw. Enter Suzanne. She is trying to send “the first e-mail I’ve ever sent in my life” to an uncertain address in Thailand. She hopes the recipient will visit her on Hydra bringing “tapes of flute music.” Exit, with a reference to the fable of the Princess and the Pea.

  Another of Suzanne’s personae is that of Goldilocks—“Who’s been opening my cupboard? Who’s been tampering with my door?” Except, of course, that although she ought to be Goldilocks, she behaves more like a bear. She cannot help standing all myths and folk tales on their heads. In this instance, she suspects those three ursine characters, Sarah, Steve, and, especially, Evangelia, “who creeps around.”

  This summer we had been having what could pass for “normal” exchanges when we met in the street or on the harbor. Much to my disappointment, I must confess, as I prefer to create my own Suzanne who is not of this world and speaks only in oracles. We had even reached the point where she seriously asked my opinion about her transplanting some of the banana-plants. “I understand bananas,” she told me. “I grew up in a banana culture—in Florida.” What could be more normal than that?

  One night I had just had a shower and was stark naked when I heard Suzanne’s voice calling me from below. I hastily flung on a dressing gown and stepped out onto my balcony.

  SELF: “Let’s do a Romeo and Juliet in reverse.”

  SHE: “That’s not such a bad idea.”

  I explained to her how to come around to where I was. She tripped lightly up my fourteen metal steps, and there she was, on my terrace. Straightaway she was transfixed by the lamplit view of “her” garden and “her” bananas. There was no suggestion that I overlooked “her” property too much or infringed her privacy (for which, incidentally, there is no word in Greek). She simply marveled at my splendid prospect, my bananorama.

  She told me she’d been pruning today. Talk about the dread fury with the abhorrèd shears. But the main purpose of her visit was to ask me to interpret between her and Evangelia.

  She launched into a huge tirade. She alleged that Evangelia is skilled in the art of using sob stories to extract money from people. She claimed that she (Suzanne) had handed over a fistful of dollars toward the dowry of Evangelia’s daughter so that said daughter could marry her policeman boyfriend. All the thanks Suzanne received, she maintained, was to be shopped by Evangelia for using drugs, and the son-in-law policeman used the bust to advance his career.

  (I have now heard many versions of this story. What is extraordinary is not that they are all different but that they all agree on one point—i.e., that L.’s house was awash with drugs. Whatever the drugs were, they were more serious than cannabis. Nobody has tried to deny this. Yet everybody expresses enormous indignation that the house should have been raided.)

  L. had told Suzanne that Steve had said that the stones in the garden were difficult to walk on. (They are.) “Only if you’re a paraplegic,” snorted Suzanne. She made no reference to Koulis’s and Evangelia’s vegetables, only claimed that that part of the garden had needed “paving” because it was full of weeds and dust— and Evangelia never weeded. She expressed a hope that the cement would acquire a patina with time.

  She came out with one of her splendid one-liners: “Do you smell the incense from the little chapel?” (Aghios Tykhon). I don’t. Much.

  SELF: “So now you can understand the poem about the wind in the bananas.”

  SHE: “I would have thought it was too far to hear the wind.”

  SELF: “Not when it’s a strong wind.”

  Leaving behind floating pockets of a surprisingly crude scent, she departed. I felt as though I had entertained something unawares, not an angel exactly but a combination of Eve, Lilith, the Serpent, and a Cherub with a flaming sword—to name but a few of the ingredients.

  A day or two later, for about an hour and a half, I interpreted between Evangelia and Suzanne. We sat in the once beautiful kitchen with doors and windows closed to keep out the beast. We wandered round the house. We walked in the garden. Everywhere we talked.

  I felt like a cross between a boxing referee and one of those pathetic international negotiators who fly around the world going through the motions of arbitrating between parties who will never be reconciled. I had to keep reminding myself that I was only the interpreter and not to allow myself to be influenced by the barrage of propaganda coming from either side. Detachment came more easily if I kept reminding myself how this improbable situation had started with a wind, bananas, a poem.

  We inspected windows, rice-paper lampshades, rubbish heaps, doors, plants, trees, the Sisters of Mercy’s hobbling cobbles. We discussed the lavatory, the small oven, the bamboo chairs, the cushion covers, Steve and Sarah, L.’s money, workmen. . . .

  The two women circled each other, looking for openings. Suzanne again alleged that Evangelia had misused L.’s contributions, and that that was why inferior work had been done on the house. Evangelia countered with claims that Suzanne was easy prey for workmen who cheated her by, for example, charging her huge sums of money to remove sacks of garden rubbish and rubble, which they then transported only a few yards.

  Suzanne said she wanted some plants removed from pots on the terrace and replanted in the garden. Evangelia hissed in my ear: “It’s to stop me going onto the terrace to water them. She thinks I spy on her.” Suzanne’s latest obsession was that all flowers must be gray or white—“I have a thing against red.” She pointed out a particular gray-leaved foliage plant that she said she loved and wanted everywhere.

  Mostly Suzanne was very meek. She said she respected Evangelia because she was getting older and had a heart problem—she tried not to overwork her. Evangelia (aside to me) pooh-poohed all this, saying that Suzanne was simply paving (!) the way to dismissing Evangelia.

  Evangelia went on and on about how Suzanne had allowed everything in the garden to dry up—“people are talking”—and how Suzanne had been watering trees, particularly the bananas, in the wrong way, pointing the hose downward so that soil was washed away from plants instead of toward them. As soon as she muttered to me that the garden would never have dried up if Koulis had still been looking after it, Suzanne pounced on the name “Koulis” and demanded a translation. Evangelia believes that Suzanne speaks good Greek and only pretends not to understand and to need an interpreter.

  Suzanne took us down to the scary basement to demonstrate how she plans to lock all her most precious possessions, such as wineglasses and mosquito nets, in the two small rooms so that nobody can get
at them. To show how valuable her belongings are, she mentioned that she had paid excess baggage charges of three thousand French francs in order to bring the correct accessories for her dinner parties. She will retain the only key.

  I am beginning to think as deviously as Evangelia. It rapidly occurred to me that on the pretext of protecting her bits and pieces, Suzanne would be rendering inaccessible most of the books in the house, meaning that I would no longer be able to browse among the dog-eared, heterogeneous collection and finger such gems as the poems of Nazim Hikmet (a Turkish poet dear to the Banana Princess), an 1890s volume on the Jesuits in Canada, or Nick Germanacos’s English translation of Margarita Karapanou’s Kassandra and the Wolf.

  I can see that that way madness lies. I can hear Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke yelling at me: “You think the universe revolves round you, don’t you?” The trouble is that, since I’m happy in my paranoia, I see no reason to fight it. It’s harmless, and more sanity would mean less creativity. There may well be a universe that does not revolve around me, but these pages are about the one that does.

  The parts of the house that I saw seemed exactly the same as when I last saw them a few months ago, before Sarah and Steve left. It felt very strange to be back as an interpreter in a house where I had been so welcome as a friend. But even stranger to be aware that Suzanne’s was the face that had launched a thousand notebook entries in Death of a Lady’s Man.

  I could scarcely contain my thrill of recognition when, as we stood on the terrace, Suzanne gestured with a bony hand toward the roof, saying: “I’m going to have something done about the eaves.” I was remembering this passage from page 163:

  Yesterday my dark companion told me to come quickly and quietly, but I missed what she tried to save for me: two sparrows mating in the eaves. “Have you ever seen them fuck?”

  She used her fingers to evoke the shuddering tail-feathers.

  It is curious that another passage (p. 108) also connects Suzanne with a bird:

  She said, Leonard, whenever you leave the room an orange bird comes to the window.

  At certain times of year, black redstarts with their rufous tails frequent L.’s garden. In this one sentence, L. has managed to combine Suzanne’s evident interest in birds with her capacity for making enigmatic, Delphic pronouncements. She is not only a Kassandra but also a female auspex, or bird-seer, an oionistria. Indeed, she herself is more bird than locust, with her petite beak and claw-like fingers—a leaf-warbler or a wren, perhaps, flitting among the foliage.

  As impartial interpreter, I managed to remain aloof until Suzanne offered Evangelia, as a peace token, a five-thousand-drachma note to pay an Albanian woman who had done some work in the house. I insisted that a very reluctant Evangelia accept it. But it would take more than that to make peace. Evangelia, in her turn, insisted on my translating: “You don’t understand about bills because you’re not used to paying out money.”

  Having had the last word, Evangelia still wanted the last last word. As we were leaving, she embarked on a scathing attack on the manner in which Suzanne, with the assistance of an Albanian, had transplanted two or three banana trees. Suzanne insisted that she does have horticultural expertise—she demonstrated how she had deftly pruned various other fruit trees. The punch line came with Evangelia uttering, and me translating, the immortal words: “There is no banana problem.”

  When I got home to my Olivetti, I hammered out in capitals: I CANNOT BELIEVE ANY OF THIS IS HAPPENING.

  Evangelia commented to me: “It’s such a pity they broke up. They could have become one of the leading families on Hydra.”

  The following morning, I met Suzanne for coffee at her request. I took her to one of my favorite places, a café called the Veranda, high up above the port. She said she had never been there before. We had some pleasant conversation about:

  A. How she works as a copyist at the Louvre. I resisted the temptation to ask her if she ever copies the Mona Lisa. Security is tight, and the chief rule is that a copy must never have the same dimensions as the original. I suppose this is to discourage copyists from hanging their own work on the wall and walking out with an original. But I still couldn’t see how it deterred an expert copyist from forgery. I tried, unsuccessfully, to question her about this. It seems a curious profession (if profession it be), but it would be hard to dream up one more suitable for the mysterious Suzanne.

  B. How she was brought up as a Christian and found herself unable to bring her children up in the Jewish way L. wanted. He supplied the Law, she said. Not clear what she supplied.

  C. How her son, Adam, has made a record of his own songs. (I later discovered that the album has the imaginative title “Adam Cohen.” If he makes another one, what will he call it?) How her daughter, Lorca, used to work as a pastry-cook but gave it up after a chef shouted at her for dropping a tart. Lorca now has a boutique in Los Angeles that sells furniture from the 1930s.

  D. How she believes in the Divine in everything, and that you can only make art if you have an idea of the Divine as you work. She hesitates to criticize Campbell’s soup cans, but she cannot see the Divine therein. In her copying work she returns again and again to the old masters. She is slowly attempting her own original painting. She is working on pictures here on Hydra. A nomadic New Zealander is teaching her gilding techniques. Lily, gild thyself!

  E. How, if only she had money, she would love to carry out major work on the Hydra property. To build up walls, to dig out earth, to expose the buried ruin as a “feature,” to open up a big window in the basement, to redecorate the interior. It seems that after all, Suzanne and Evangelia may be sisters under the skin.

  I was enjoying all this, more than happy that Suzanne showed no inclination to ask me any questions about myself, when suddenly a woman with a little girl came and plonked herself down beside us. It became abundantly clear that Suzanne had asked this lady to join us for a specific purpose.

  She turned out to be an American-Greek, married to a Hydraean, who had done interpreting for Suzanne in the past and said she was very glad to relinquish the job. At Suzanne’s prompting, they both launched into a comprehensive effort to blacken Evangelia’s name. Suzanne called Evangelia a liar and a thief. The other woman dutifully backed up everything Suzanne said. I did my best to say as little as possible.

  Suzanne returned yet again to the subject of the notorious drug raid. She claimed that there was no question of any old man or “elder” spying on her. The whole thing, she alleged, was the work of Evangelia, with the help of and in order to help her policeman son-in-law. Suzanne and her man friend escaped jail by paying fifty thousand dollars. After the payment of the money, Suzanne said the police destroyed the drugs they had seized.

  I had the happy thought, while she was wittering, that the fact that the whole affair culminated in a court case strengthened the parallel with the story of Susanna and the Elders—I had not consciously made this connection before. But, as with most analogies in this bananarrative, the story is turned upside down by the fact that this Suzanne was guilty as charged. It almost tempts one to reopen the original case. Maybe it was not as open-and-shut as clever Daniel made out.

  (Jane, who used to live in one of the topmost houses on the hill overlooking the harbor, painted a surreal picture of how, one scorching summer afternoon when everyone and everything was asleep, years ago, she happened to look down from her terrace and saw that L.’s garden was swarming with little men in dark suits carrying briefcases. It was the bust.)

  Suzanne departed uttering threats that Evangelia was going to receive her marching orders as soon as possible from either Leonard or Adam or both. . . .

  A day or two later, Evangelia and I had another session chez Suzanne. Evangelia was still seething beneath the surface, although this time Suzanne was all sweetness and light. She was dressed in a minuscule black one-piece with no sleeves, terminating in exiguous shorts. She is tiny. No wonder Evangelia says you could mistake her for a locust among the leaves.


  There was no hint of her wanting to have Evangelia fired. She asked Evangelia to do some cleaning for her before she leaves. She consulted her about which workmen to employ. Evangelia was actually telephoning a workman in the back room when the man Suzanne had been waiting for for five weeks arrived to work on windows and doors.

  Evangelia hastily put down the telephone. But making the call had given us the pretext to go into the back room—L.’s workroom, where Steve used to sit writing, when he was here, in the “Marianne” chair. I just had time to notice some huge canvases of Suzanne’s laid out on the floor. She said it didn’t matter if we walked on them. They looked vague and abstract.

  While Suzanne was talking to the workman, Evangelia told me that a year or two ago, Suzanne had produced a truly wonderful painting of L. playing the guitar under some trees (bananas?). It was for one of L.’s birthdays. “You see,” commented Evangelia, “they still have friendly relations.”

  Suzanne told us that for the replacement of a window, she would have to get an estimate from this workman that she would then send to L. for his approval.

  EVANGELIA: “But I thought you said that you had already given him the money for the window?”

  SUZANNE (sheepishly): “Oh yes, I forgot. Thank you for reminding me.”

  EVANGELIA (aside to me): “You see, this is what she is like all the time. By the time the workman has finished, she’ll probably have forgotten again.”

  Suzanne had been watering the garden during her sojourn here, but now she asked Evangelia to take over the task again. Evangelia said she would do it, but (pointedly) in the evenings, not in the early mornings like Suzanne, when the sun quickly dries everything up. At night the water has time to sink in and do good.