by Roger Green
Suzanne stressed that Evangelia was not to prune anything or plant anything. This despite her instructions last time to plant the gray-leaved thing everywhere. What a georgic! What an eclogue! What a back-to-front idyll!
Suzanne thanked me profusely for my help and promised to buy me a meal the following evening. . . .
Staggered home to reflect again on the utter strangeness of finding myself on the inside of a scene I had started off contemplating from the outside. The analogy occurred to me of Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Furthermore, Suzanne is Alice. That doesn’t mean that she can’t be Kassandra, Susanna, Eve, Lilith, Medusa, and the rest as well. But she is definitely Alice spaced out on magic mushrooms; Alice adrift in a world of White Knights and Red Queens; Alice shrunk after drinking the labeled bottle.
Sadly, I don’t have the Alice books to hand. I can never remember what comes in which. But it doesn’t matter because Suzanne inhabits both Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world. L.’s garden even looks like Tenniel’s drawings—flamingoes, hedgehogs, and playing-card people would not be out of place. Evangelia is either the Duchess or the Red Queen or both. Goodness knows who I am. Roger the Dodgson? Roger White Rabbit? Old Father Roger? An Anglo-Saxon Interpreter?
But, yes, it is a question of breaking through a glass or a membrane to enter a world where everything works, if not backward, at least according to unaccustomed, surreal rules. As I keep trying to stress, there are no boundaries; there are no barriers, no glass, no membrane; but we have to pass through them to discover their nonexistence. And Suzanne holds the mirror. Ultimately, Suzanne is also Suzanne.
We are in the realm of the Metaphysicals, of Thomas Traherne’s puddle—“When that thin skin is broken”—and George Herbert’s:
A man that looks on glass
On it may stay his eye,
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass
And there the heaven espy.
Of Vaughan’s “I saw eternity the other night”—completely casual and matter-of-fact. Isn’t it obvious? We are in Lorca’s pastry shop. She is the Queen of Hearts making tarts. We are also in Lorca’s Garden of Lunar Grapefruit—which are, of course, bananas.
Everything means. I’d love to be able to explain my vision so simply that an adult could understand it. (Children, of course, understand it anyway.) But I can’t. Who said: A poem should not mean, but be? Whoever it was missed the next vital step. A poem means by being; by being a poem means; by being everything means. You can come here to search, as I have. You can leave here to search, as L. has. It is here, and here is everywhere.
The following evening, Suzanne was waiting for me in the courtyard of the little restaurant. Another surprise, I must confess. I had expected her at least to be late, at most to forget altogether. Again she asked me nothing about myself. She was not feeling very well. On the one hand, she said, this could be because she had drunk some iced tea made with tap water; on the other hand it was possible that Evangelia had bewitched her.
Suzanne said that a mirror had been placed in the street opposite her house door, so that when she stepped outside, she was confronted with her own image. She suspected Evangelia of doing this. She said she had now moved the mirror. She didn’t say whether it had cracked from side to side, or whether she had beheld anything else in it—a knight in armor, say, or an angel— besides herself.
Mirror, mirror, in the street,
Whose nose is the most petite?
(One of the things I enjoy about this narrative—and oh, how much I enjoy it!—is that while I am busy straining after gnats, dirty great camels amble in and make themselves comfortable without my noticing.)
“Ask Evangelia,” Suzanne urged me. “Ask her whether she knows anything about black magic. Don’t mention me, of course. Just tell her casually that you are having a problem with somebody and wonder whether she knows any charms that would help.” (Yes, Suzanne. And what about yourself, my dear? Would you happen to know any?)
She ordered a lot of food but ate very little and fed as much as she could to passing cats. She told me that even as we were speaking, she was being plagued by mosquitoes, although I couldn’t see any. She placed a small plastic device on the table with a glowing red light. She said it was emitting a high-frequency noise that was supposed to keep mosquitoes away. She was also wearing four different kinds of repellent. (Talk about the princess and the pea.) I dared to suggest that possibly covering up her exposed areas of skin might be more effective, whereupon she produced a shawl that she draped around her shoulders, complimenting me on my good idea.
Mainly to make some conversation (which was in short supply), I told her that my wife (my second wife—we are separated but not divorced) was coming to visit me tomorrow. Suzanne livened up a bit at this news and (again without asking anything about the background) predicted that I might be amazed at the outcome. “Men always credit women with being more subtle than they really are. She just wants to see you.”
Inevitably we ended up talking about L.’s garden. For this reader of Death of a Lady’s Man (which, of course, I did not mention—I wonder whether she has read it), it was extraordinary to sit and listen to the Man’s Woman expatiate on how the garden used to be full of weeds and daisies. She even admitted that the bumpy stones might have been a mistake. “But the Irish girls had nothing else to do that summer. At least they keep the weeds away.”
She spoke about how she has transplanted (with the help of Albanians) two or three of the banana-plants. (I had noticed that this had been done but sadly did not witness the actual process— they must be ten to fifteen feet tall. Evangelia, naturally, alleged that the plants had been deliberately repositioned to block her view.) “I wish I had seen them on the move,” I said. “It must have been like Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Everything is symbolic, isn’t it?”
A day or two later, in the cool of the evening, I saw Evangelia watering the garden and called out to her. She beckoned me over. On the broad terrace (the deck, as Steve calls it): two big sofas with cushions, three or four large bamboo armchairs ditto, and a table. An arrangement out of La Jalousie that M. Robbe-Grillet could have spent several pages describing.
Quivering with indignation, Evangelia took me on a quick tour of the garden. “SHE has ruined MY garden”, she kept saying. “It was beautiful when Koulis and I looked after it. Now it is a mess.” She claimed that by inexpert watering, Suzanne had washed away the stones surrounding the trees in little whitewashed circles. (The other day Suzanne ordered Evangelia: No more whitewashing of trees or stones.) Angrily she led me to a vine arbor where Suzanne had been “pruning” (mainly picking off shriveled grapes) and had left the debris on the ground. “Who does she think is going to pick all this up? Anyway, it’s the wrong time of year for pruning.”
Up on the terrace, Evangelia shouted in a peremptory way for Suzanne to come out. Suzanne appeared and remained calm and courteous while Evangelia rumbled on. I translated: “You have ruined her garden.” (Whose garden? I kept thinking of Under the Volcano.) But miraculously the threat of eruption passed, and talk turned to the comparatively safer subject of cushion covers.
Ralph (Steve’s name for it, even though it appears to be a bitch), the mangy poodle confined to the roof opposite, started to bark and then had a crap in full view. We all three united in criticizing Ralph’s owners. Suzanne observed that there was an unfortunate tendency among Greeks to keep poodles as status symbols (what status?)—only she said “doodles” by mistake and gigglingly corrected herself.
While all this was happening, Evangelia suddenly rushed down to the street without explanation. Looking over the wall, we saw her groveling in the central gutter to uproot a small, nondescript plant. She rushed breathlessly back up the stairs, presented the specimen to Suzanne, and told her to plant it. Suzanne and I were bewildered. (More black magic?) Evangelia departed in dudgeon. Suzanne behaved perfectly throughout.
I stayed on a little longer, alth
ough declining the offer of a glass of wine. This time we did talk about the Mona Lisa, as there had been some articles in the press about the pros and cons of restoring it. It transpired that it is not one of the paintings that Suzanne copies in the Louvre, but she loves it and believes it could not be restored without being ruined.
Although almost nothing in this bananologue is contrived, I have to confess that I deliberately raised the subject of La Gioconda: (a) recalling how I had brought in the theme right at the beginning of this text before I had any idea what I was embarked upon (I still don’t) and (b) because I could not resist the secret kick of hearing Leonardo’s lady speak of another lady by another Leonardo.
Let alone (c): (c) is the most exquisite pleasure of all, known only to perverts like me—that of manipulating an unwitting person to say something while, at the same time, you are nursing the secret that you will go home and make the conversation part of a rambling construction you are engaged upon. No wonder most writers take refuge in fiction. No wonder most writers of nonfiction are so unpopular. I am unrepentant. Giving the narrative a nudge is all part of the story.
My wife had duly made her visit. While she was here, we bumped into Suzanne in the street, and I introduced them. Now Suzanne and I stood chatting amicably about our relationships with our ex-partners. She said she now gets on well with L. I said I now get on well with Jules. She thanked me again for all my help.
Later I had to face an inquisition from Evangelia and made at least two errors. One (I plead in mitigation that I was under intense pressure): I admitted that Suzanne had said uncomplimentary things about Evangelia. But after that I dug my heels in and refused to detail them. Interestingly, Evangelia’s first question was: “Did she say that I was the cause of the breakup between her and Leonardo?” At least I was able to say “No” to that, hand on heart.
Two: I mentioned that Suzanne had said that “the spying old man” in the house of the other Suzanne had never existed, and that it was Evangelia herself who had shopped her to the police. Evangelia, smart as any lawyer, seized on the fact that this meant I had revealed to Suzanne that Evangelia and I had been talking about the “bust.” I ought not to have done this.
Evangelia and Koulis then revised their story, saying that it was an elderly couple in the house next door who had spied on Suzanne and reported her. The windows, they explained, had been differently sited at the time. Evangelia kept asking: “Why would I report her? What had I got to gain?”
Evangelia continued at length about how she believes that what people do in their own homes, even if it is illegal, is sacred. She gave some graphic examples of the kind of thing she alleges that Suzanne and her friends used to get up to in L.’s absence, adding that she (Evangelia) was always loyal to Leonardo and would never have violated his trust.
As I was leaving, Evangelia lent me a copy of Takhydromos (Postman), a glossy Greek magazine, for April 7, 1988, containing an interview with L., translated into Greek, conducted in Paris on the occasion of the launch there of his album I’m Your Man. She lent it to me because of this passage:
I speak a little Greek. I have friends. I have neighbours on Hydra whom I know very well. Koulis and Evangelia who live next door to me, are my family.
Evangelia didn’t need to demonstrate to me the love that obviously exists between L. and herself and Koulis. She knew that. But she was justifiably proud of having that affection testified to in print.
Lovely stuff. But I was thunderstruck by an illustration that accompanied the article. It was a photograph of the poster used in France to advertise I’m Your Man. Under the headline “The Masterpiece of Leonard” (Le chef d’oeuvre de Léonard) is a picture of the record sleeve, complete with the inset of L. eating “his” banana. It is being held up and displayed by none other than La Gioconda herself, wearing the enigmatic smile of Suzanne.
L. continues ruminatively munching, oblivious of the Mona Lisa peering hugely over the top of the record like an inscrutable Chad who might be asking: “Wot, no bananas?” He imagines that at worst, “what everyone else sees is a guy with his mouth full of banana.” Little does he know that what we spectators actually observe is a guy with his mouth full of banana who, without knowing it, is in the grip of a Sphinx asking impossible riddles. Behind you! Behind you!
Suzanne left without saying good-bye to Evangelia, who says Suzanne has never set foot in her house and never wishes so much as a “good day” to anyone in the neighborhood. Evangelia summoned me from L.’s garden to inspect the house with her. She wanted me to translate little labels in English that Suzanne had stuck around the place.
On the refrigerator: “I have been painted with a new kind of paint for which we do not know the formula. Please do not place hot or scratchy things on me or on the table.”
On the small electric oven: “Please clean me after each use.”
On a line of books on the work table: “Please return the book by A. Huxley. It is an important book for this house.”
On the door of the small downstairs room in the scary basement: “This door is locked. Please do not force it. Only personal possessions are stored here.”
Suzanne clearly thought (a) that Steve and Sarah had taken the (unspecified) book by Huxley and (b) that they were going to come back and read all her notices. Whom else could they possibly have been directed at?
Again, we are back in the world of Alice, where everything carries an instruction such as “Eat Me,” “Drink Me.” And where does that line come from—somewhere in Betjeman, surely— “That was writ by A. Huxléy”? Why, asked Evangelia, doesn’t she just write to “Uncle Steve” and ask him if he has the book? And, she inquires, did she really go through all those old books and decide that just one, that one, was missing? I regret to report that Evangelia called Suzanne a fasina, a word not in my dictionary. Apparently it means a kind of floor-cloth.
Evangelia was not pleased because Suzanne had departed leaving all the aforementioned furniture on the terrace as well as a sort of uncollapsed collapsible cupboard just inside the front door. She complained that she would have to find workmen to deal with all these and other things.
Suzanne had put practically every glass, plate, dish, spoon, etc. behind her Bluebeardian locked door as well as many important books for this house. In the workroom she had left the old guitar hanging on the wall, a strange old musical instrument on top of the glass-fronted cupboard, and a new painting (probably by her, as it displayed much gilt work) of some sort of sacred Asiatic face. Evangelia meant to suggest Buddha, but, by a slip of the tongue, she named Judas.
Sleepwalking
Death is wonderful and beautiful. It happens to each one of us, yet we do not celebrate it sufficiently. We rage against the dying of the light when we ought to rejoice. It is a mystery like the Eleusinian mysteries. It is a mystery in the sense of a sacrament. Go accepting. Go great and gracious. Do go gentle.
I saw Death in a shining lane
Jolly, not grim;
In one hand a delicate sickle—
By that I recognised him.
(Death also, more enigmatically, carried a Greek translation of Studies in European Realism by George Lukacs. He asked me if I thought it was any good. Death is not omnipotent, let alone omniscient. He is a supreme expert, with a monopoly in his field, but of course the poor creature [not sure if that is the right word] needs advice on matters outside his absolute, but narrow, territory. He is pathetically grateful to those few who will even give him the time of day—or the timelessness of eternity.)
It all began with L., Steve Sanfield, George Lialios, and maybe one or two others passing the Swiss LSD and poring over Evans-Wentz’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. (When Steve took me to visit George in his haunted Schloss on the hill, I was privileged to handle the very same two volumes of Evans-Wentz that used to spark their debates and meditations.) Elsewhere, slightly earlier, the young Lawrence Durrell had discovered and been excited by the same text.
It began
with death. But death as in-betweenness. Death as life. Death as positive. Death as a journey with maps. (Death has been far more thoroughly charted than Hydra ever has.) Death as a trip. It began not with birth but with burial. “Everything goes underground and rejoins the game!” With Herakles/ Hercules burying the Hydra’s immortal head. With L. burying the first thing he ever wrote, sewn into his dead father’s bow tie. With the buried foundations of the house of the woman who sold pease-pudding during the war. (If war doesn’t kill you, love will.) With her buried cauldron and stirring stick with cross-shaped end.
Again—as throughout this bananarrative—the myths become mixed. L. himself, as I now perceive, contains more than a little of Prospero. Yet the staff that may or may not lie buried in his garden belonged to a sort of Sycorax figure. (Canine Caliban lives just around the corner.) Magic is afoot. The spagyrical reconciliation of opposites is at work.
There comes to mind John Wain’s visionary poem “Prospero’s Staff in the Earth,” one fragment of which reads :
The most important thing was the forgiveness.
The staff was buried because the quarrel was.
The magic died with no one left to hate.
It was the cheated man who studied runes:
On the atoll of his rejection he brooded over spells. . . .
(A runic incantation!) And the conclusion of which goes:
So on the island of Prospero’s rough magic
the polished staff put knowledge in the earth,
the highest knowledge and yet the commonest. . . .
While off the rocky point, the book sways down
to the sea-bed, and the magician’s house