Orthokostá

by Thanassis Valtinos

  Valtinos’s speakers come from or go through places that are inseparable from their own and their families’ identities. The metaphor, a synecdoche really, is saying, “If you’re looking for ‘art’ it’s out there,” in a territory of narrowly topical and date-bound, often warring, site-specific states. Allusions to places of birth, mixed in with the speakers’ relatives and acquaintances, make Orthokostá appear at first to be just another demographic dump of the Greek Civil War and its participants. To the untrained ear they are as superficially unattractive as the four-hundred-line catalogue of ships in the Iliad—a 1955 translation omitted them as of no interest to the modern reader!—which enumerates both the European and the Asian expeditionary contingents that participated in the siege of Troy. It is true that the illusionism of the main action in the Iliad is momentarily suspended. In its place, and behind the euphony of locations like Sparta, Epidaurus, Mycenae, Euboea, Ithaca—to Valtinos’s “Parnon” “Karatoula,” “Tripolis,” and “Argos”—one notices that Homer’s catalogue is also about the families the troops leave behind, the attributes of the locales they come from, the miniature epics of still other alliances and hatreds: in other words of countless other Troys embedded in the framework of the main epos. In Orthokostá whole neighborhoods, individual plots of land, and even stone fences are known by their founders’ or builders’ names. Trajectories of movement through fields or towns are marked by itemized ownerships. The naming rituals of older titles, the degrees of belonging to a family network, or the rituals of christening and mourning that fill the book all build up to the chora—a term adopted by the theoretician Jacques Derrida from Plato’s Timaeus for the matrix of villages that, in this case, mysteriously engender language and social relations. The unfailing rootedness to conditions on the ground of any entries in Valtinos’s lists, long or short, adduced by the narrators seems to be saying insistently that whoever touches a man touches a place, cherished or haunted.

  Chora can be alarmingly literal as well. In one of the shortest chapters of the book the speaker describes a team of mules loaded with sacks of chestnuts traveling by night. When the animals suddenly freeze in their tracks the muleteer wonders whether they had sensed the macabre past under their hooves. Washington Irving and Balaam’s Ass from the book of Numbers converge upon the reader’s novelized interviewee, who wonders whether it was “the devil playing tricks, or . . . the smell of blood—three years since Fotiás was killed there.” The reader has long sensed that the indirection by which so much information is conveyed to the page is intentional and that possibly the blurry contours and the discontinuous nature of its interludes are so many nudges toward the participatory cast of this fiction, the active connecting of lines of thought and the juxtaposing of the varying gradients of truthfulness (or posing) between the book’s two covers. The reader’s co-authoring of Orthokostá is of the same critical order as that called for by Laurence Sterne’s refracted fabulations in Tristram Shandy or by Julio Cortázar’s Escherian Hopscotch.

  Valtinos does not divulge the information as to how the first-person reports in the novel came into his possession, or the process by which they lined themselves up for the readable, published version. The documents fascinate from the start by their alternating emphases and changing points of view. Some are prodding investigations while others are tableau-like miniatures of pathos. Even bathos. Take the execution of an emaciated old woman who refuses to betray her son’s whereabouts and is killed on the spot. Others read like Norse sagas. Burnt Njall is an apt analogue as the wind blows in cinders from burning homes in the vicinity. Homer’s retelling of the siege of Meleager’s home in the Iliad is clearly reenacted here. Meleager dies when his external soul, a log that was saved by his mother from the hearth when he was born, is thrown back into the fire by his mother. Orthokostá-like—paralleled by a notorious female rebel leader who stridently demands that her own father and brothers be put to death—Meleager and his household are doomed to die at the hands of none other than his mother’s brothers. The opposing sides in the novel burn each other’s homes down while also holding separate “courts” in the mountains to judge and hang their rivals. A sizable part of the population is made to choose between forced conscription and summary execution while another beleaguered group prefers volunteering for camps in Germany to being held hostage in the place of relatives who had taken refuge in Athens.

  The persona of the non-omniscient narrator whom, for convenience’ sake, we can call Valtinos, reappears in later chapters of the book in order to close an epic ring composition and to pose questions that mark him as another local, on intimate terms with various families’ histories and, frequently, an acquaintance of the speakers. There are moments when the questions resemble Socrates’ maieutic method of facilitating the birthing of a story or Homer’s questioning of his hero. The working assumption in Orthokostá seems to have been that the integrity of every testimony would be preserved at all stylistic costs and that all “data,” commented on or not, would be respected as delivered and as recorded. More narrowly, “style” for Valtinos is the projection of the vividness of the medium he salvaged from the mouths of the protagonists of the novel with as little manipulation as possible. The initially choppy, fragmented phrasing of any one of his speakers occurring anywhere in a section may go on for some time, until a particular idiom explodes that cancels out all the inarticulate fumblings leading up to it and brings with it an unforgettable, often surprising turn of thought. The Greek that the obscure villagers of Orthokostá speak, be they in or out of uniform, be they victims or victimizers, communicates an expressive vigor that even under the duress of recollecting the troubled times is nothing short of astounding. The array of the narratives of the novel seems to be saying, Let the people at the receiving end of history talk as they will and two things will emerge simultaneously: on the one hand the kind of local knowledge that the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chronicles of the Morea—another name for the Peloponnese—or Cyprus, for example, are famous for, and on the other the torrents of live eloquence one associates with Froissart and Xenophon.

  The chapters are subtly intertwined, and so are the interludes. The withholding, for instance, of a specific detail for hundreds of pages until its significance is made clear in a new, still shifting context affects the reader’s sense of time and disbelief. And it affirms Valtinos’s sense of the dignity of what would have otherwise been trivial facets of the essentially subjective nature of human experience. Valtinos is so fastidious about not overstating a particular mood he often concludes with aphoristic brevity or by the mere restating of his speakers’ last words.

  This book may help explain the attraction Valtinos’s dry, laconic style holds for his readers. The “intermittency” of the Civil War material with the shorter prose poems, besides serving to return the reader to the life of the senses, reveals a Valtinos constantly on the lookout for the other kinds of life going on even among the ruins. Indeed, there are rich doses of Bakhtinian “novelizing” in Orthokostá. Squabbles erupt over a stolen watch. The killing of two ravenous dogs ends in reconciliation. Neighboring villagers who fear a poor citrus fruit crop for that year resign themselves to planting onions. These “gratuitous” minor incidents could be considered as contrastive textures that are inserted in an otherwise torrential series. It is through variations of this kind that Valtinos communicates textual complexity. For lack of a better term they might be called pauses plastiques. They appear as a thematic punctuation in the flow of the longer stories. And they also prevent facile symmetries. Cameo-like, they are breathers permitting the continuous exposition to assume the tones of poetry. Predictability is broken up by the subtle associations afforded by the inserts. Beginning with chapter 3, and ending on the last page of the last chapter of the book, these snapshots are the space in which the unnamed participant observer intrudes the least and sometimes even vanishes altogether. From a literary-historical point of view, alternating the modes of a single composition is part of a trad
ition that reaches back to the Attic playwrights’ polyrhythms, the Roman prosimetra, and the Christian liturgy. From Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi’s Dove’s Neck Ring About Love of the tenth century and Rigas Feraeos’s Mismayés of the eighteenth there is but a short step to Orthokostá. The contrapuntal, collagistic Orthokostá could not adequately convey a sense of suffering humanity in the round if the uneven chords it struck did not resonate with its readership’s familiarity with other more traditional and more modern projects in music, architecture, and the visual arts. Meaning, in the novel, emerges to a far greater extent from its reading than from its writing.

  As the short chapters are mounted in the midst of the longer ones they tend to be emblematic of circumstances as well as of states of mind. In a barely four-line section a woman is asked if she remembered the incident of concealing someone inside a storage trunk: “She started to cry. Poor thing, she’s an old lady now, all shriveled up.” The souls, even of the bravest, as in many of Homer’s martial encounters, depart with a whimper. Valtinos’s snapshots function much like the linguist Roman Jakobson’s continuators, both phatic and evocatory.

  Whatever else makes up the chapters of the book is suddenly pushed into the background by the awareness that in the midst of untold calamities a young woman can still be romanced and proposed to by a rebel captain passing through, while another can be coveted by a rightist hothead who can find no other way to be near her except by arresting and re-arresting her; trains are somehow still connecting small townships to county seats; while a handful of naked German soldiers take a dip in a stream of mountainous Arcadia. It is these short, compressed tableaus, in the final analysis, that carry the day. When the agonizing of relatives and friends finally subsides, the last image the last chapter leaves the reader with is of a villager’s speculating over a source of fresh water: if his price is not met, the water will be left to lie in its underground resting place. The site of anguish and fear for the reader is relieved by the hint of an element of life ready to gush forth if only the agency of man would not interfere with it. Even the novelist and critic Edward Dahlberg heard, in his essay “Melanctha” from Can These Bones Live, the clamor and convulsions of the age for “blood, for human offal,” as “a cry for dim and fetal beginnings.”

  The cross-layering of human motivations in Orthokostá fast acquires the status of written objects—military operations transparencies, parchment, blotting paper—all in different hands and in different inks rousing the gamut of response from rage and nostalgia to reverie. To the rest of the world the mind of a southeastern Peloponnesian in the early 1940s might well be an enigma. The two pre-forties Greek-American interludes in Orthokostá appear, superficially, to have no relation to the burning issues of the Occupation and the ensuing Civil War. But they do offer glimpses of normalcy (and comic relief) in a society where marriages are arranged for some successful emigrants, while other less disciplined returnees lose their entire life earnings to the fiats of crazed nationalists and ideologues in high places. The women also report on their looted households and the shunting from shelter to shelter of clothing, dowry items, and precious sewing machines, the signifiers of feminine dignity, scattered to the four winds by armed bullies who see no contradiction between their actions and their credos.

  By not insinuating any known voice in the master narrative and by not damning either of the fratricidal sides, Valtinos allows scenes of desperate choices to speak for themselves. Even as the Greeks commandeer historic monasteries like Orthokostá and Loukou to “process” future victims, the German occupying forces do their own culling of civilians for the labor camps at home. Does the category of a peasant society whose members are forever enmeshed in the cycles of subsistence farming and the rituals of homemaking explain the violent swings of one group to “liberationist” oppression and of its rival to murderous defensiveness? Through the unfolding of the stories themselves Valtinos distances himself enough to let the reader share in the quizzicality of the events. One woman pretends to be an epileptic—a ploy reminiscent of the Hellenistic romances—in order to avoid deportation to Germany. Only a few chapters later, a group of war-weary individuals volunteers to be taken to camps in Germany in order to escape being exterminated at home! The forces at plague, as James Joyce would have put it, would make idiocy of any attempt at generalizing.

  Forty years on, during the writing of the book, many of the bloodstained locales in the Peloponnesus were renamed—some even removed—as if chora had been acting the author: revising, crossing out, and rewording the screed on the ground. In keeping with the fragility and transitoriness of power, as quoted from the book of Psalms in the epigraph of Orthokostá, Valtinos’s sobering conclusion closely parallels George Seferis’s poem “The King of Asine.” When the “things of this world” are said and done (and turned to dust)—Asine being in the Argolis prefecture, only a few miles north of Orthokostá—some Mycenaean-age turannos’s mask of beaten gold may still survive and give back a tinny sound when a pebble is dropped on it.

  A novel is the onset of a new creation. During the fourteenth-century Plague in Florence, and a generation before Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio arranged for his storytellers’ brigade, some of whom are related to each other, just as some of the Orthokostá characters are, to meet in the church of Santa Maria Novella. And just like the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales before it, Orthokostá is an organ diapason drowning out all the personalist, jejune readings and rewritings of our times, as Derek Walcott’s Omeros would have put it, which achieve little else besides making literature as guilty as history.

  Orthokostá

  Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.

  —Psalm 2:9

  In the shadow of Mount Malevós,1 at its foothills and not too far from Orióntas Province, there stands a monastery called Orthokostá celebrating the Ninth-day Feast of the Dormition of the Virgin.2 It was erected in early Christian times but was destroyed and looted around the year 1724 by Saracens, who repeatedly raided and pillaged the region of Tsakoniá3 from all sides. The monastery was immediately rebuilt upon the still visible ruins by a monk named Barnábas Kafsoxyliótis, who truly led a hermit’s life, equal unto an angel, and was erudite in both secular and holy learning. And although at present the monastery has lapsed from its former beauty, it is once again flourishing, inhabited by approximately sixty monks who busy themselves regularly with all manner of agricultural tasks and most of the arts. Its verdant gardens boast a variety of fruit trees, while in the Foúska plain below, which is especially hospitable to olive groves, wheat, barley, beans, and other vegetables are grown, and even vineyards yielding rich vintages of mirth-inducing wine of cinnamon color. The river Mégas, descending from Mount Malevós and fed by so many streams it becomes torrential, runs through the valley. One might almost say that the entire well-being of the monastery depends on it. On the left bank of the river and along the length of the hills there is a vein of lead and silver that remains to this day unexploited. According to a belief that is hard to confirm, the underground course of this vein can be clearly traced if every year, on the morning of August 23 before dawn, one stands silently, facing east, on the upper balcony of the monastery. From this same balcony the eye can see as far as the Sea of Náfplion bounded to the north by the peak of Mount Karakovoúni, to the south by the Cape of Saint Andréas, and to the east across the sea reaching well beyond the island of Spétses. A lower mountain range encircles the area from Cape Karakovoúni all the way to that of Saint Andréas and, extending three or four miles out from the sea, it shelters the Foúska plain from the Northerlies, which may well be the cause of the heat waves during the summer. The grounds around the monastery are delightfully wooded and green the year round in any weather, its ice-cold, crystal-clear, healthful waters bestowing great delight and refreshment upon its guests.

  ISAÁKIOS, BISHOP OF RHÉON AND PRASTÓS

  An Account of the Country of Prasiae and Thyreátis

  Chapter 1

  A
ll day long the wind carried ashes down toward us. But it was quiet. In the evening we sat out in front of the house, and the men saw five people heading out from the Makrís property and going off. They went down a ways to a clearing, and they saw two of them going into the Koúros gorge, and the other three going up toward Masklinéki Vigla.1 The men came back, they said, Something’s up, we’re clearing out because they’re going to arrest us tonight. They’ll kill us. And they left right then and there. They told us women, Collect your things, get the animals out tomorrow, away from Koubíla, don’t leave anything behind. Because something’s up. They left, and we left in the morning, break of day. Me, the shepherds’ wives, and my sister-in-law, Yiórgos’s wife. Yiórgos the lawyer. She’d come there from Trípolis, they had Yiórgos in the detention camp, they’d arrested him. We gathered up the goats from Lákka. Tsioúlos’s widow was there, Lioú.2 She tried to catch some hens to take with her, she had a rooster, it got away from her. She says, Let’s not be too long, because the men told us to leave, I’ll come back and get it tonight. She went back that night, but the rooster wasn’t in the coop. They go out looking, she had her two eldest children with her, ten, eleven years old, they see feathers down on the threshing floor. Lioú says, That brute, he killed our rooster.