What Casanova Told Me

by Susan Swan

  July 8, 1797

  Independence Day came and went without my noticing. It was too hot to think. The heat grows worse by the day and today we have all kept to our rooms. Even Jacob, who likes the sun, said he was suffering. By evening, it had cooled enough for us to take a late supper of squid cooked in their own juices, along with a bowl of lightly oiled cucumbers and tomatoes. When I retired to my room, I found a note on my pillow: “Dear Asked For Philosophe: Read this little book if you wish to round out your education. Jacob.”

  The book was Thérèse Philosophe, a French anti-clerical attack written before their revolution. Some years ago, I noticed the novel on a bookshelf in Benjamin Franklin’s house in Passy. I read several pages before Father caught me. He hid it away with a smile, saying I must wait and learn about love from my husband.

  The novel tells the story of an abbé who instructs a girl, Thérèse, in the art of mutual pleasuring. As long as there is no harm to the social order, the abbé believes pleasure benefits both the sexes. It is also his claim that because the body of a woman is a smaller version of a man’s, she too can experience joy in lovemaking. This is the philosophy Jacob Casanova praised in Piraeus. I mulled over his book and then repaired to bed to test it for myself. That is, I repeatedly pressed the throbbing region of my female parts and soon fell asleep in happy exhaustion.

  Upstairs in her room, Lee had put away her retsina and was searching wearily in her suitcase for Kitty’s essay on Minoan Crete. She had to pull herself together and finish preparing for her lecture at the British consulate. After all, the lecture fee was paying her travel expenses.

  But Lordy, it had been a long, tiring ride from Patras. She and Kitty had always wanted to sail to Greece and her guidebook said it would be a leisurely way to go, conveniently overlooking the tedium of the bus trip at the end of the day. Well, it was obvious that Luce held the long ferry ride against her. And the hotel too. What a moment earlier when Luce had said she didn’t like Greece! Who would have thought someone as soft-spoken as Luce could sound fierce? A spark of Kitty flaring up in the girl.

  She hoped Luce had been given a good room. She should have explained that she and Kitty had always stayed at the Athena, that they had loved its run-down charm. So many of the new Athens hotels were ugly imitations of North American chains. She felt too weary now to check on the girl’s accommodation. Not that one hotel room differed much from another. The Greek word for hotel was xenothohio meaning a container for strangers—and that was an appropriate description of the Athena.

  Ah, well, tomorrow they were lunching with her friend, the tour guide Christine Harmon, who had organized Kitty’s tribute. Christine’s earth-mother charm would put Luce at ease.

  Lee found Kitty’s essay and settled it on her lap:

  Minoan Crete: A Peace-Loving Matrilineal Society, or a

  Culture Based on Blood Rituals and Human Sacrifice?

  by Dr. K.A. Adams

  In 1992, I received research funds to go to Crete for eight months to work on a site near Archanes. Before I start, I want to point out that I am white, English-speaking and Canadian. My parents were Christians, and as a child I attended Anglican Sunday schools, but I write here as a member of the Goddess Religion.

  In academic circles it was now a convention to declare one’s bias, Lee thought. But how typical of Kitty that she would use it before anyone else. Kitty’s openness had been a wonder. If she had learned anything from her lover it was the need to be receptive to the world. She supposed this quality was what had partly drawn her to Kitty. That, and the way Kitty rarely became discouraged. Kitty loved the Acropolis from the first moment while she, Lee, had been disheartened by the depictions of war on the classical landmark—Athena, in the Acropolis museum, with her snake, and her cruel, smiling mouth, beating back the giants; frenzied horsemen on terrified horses; a mother weeping over her fallen son, and men and boys leading wide-eyed animals to a sacrifice.

  It had taken her a while to learn to see it in all its astonishing glory. If Kitty were here with her now, she would be encouraging her to work on her speech. She tried to refocus.

  The site in Crete known as Anemospilia is located on a small hill facing north to the sea, about fourteen kilometres from the palace of Knossos. I had been invited to help investigate the findings of the Sakellarakis team (a husband and wife) who argue that their discovery of a body in the ruins of the temple at Anemospilia proved that the peaceful Minoans practised human sacrifice.

  First, some background: The English archaeologist Arthur Evans coined the term Minoan from King Minos mentioned in The Iliad. It was Evans who, at the turn of the century, carried out the first major excavations at Knossos, along with a partial reconstruction of the palace.

  A wealthy Englishman, steeped in Greek history, Evans came to Knossos expecting to find a political kingdom run by men, and that is what he believed he had found. His faith was in “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome”—Byron’s phrase. Evans believed Knossos was ruled by a king although he was impressed by palace frescoes that showed women playing a prominent role in sports and religious processions.

  Modern archaeologists have been slow to respond to twentieth-century feminism and its fresh interpretation of Knossos. Many within the academic establishment have criticized the findings of the late Marija Gimbutas, who argued that the Minoans were part of a Neolithic group she called “the old Europeans,” and that they, like other Neolithic peoples, worshipped a goddess of regeneration. Her carefully mapped research has been largely ignored.

  The reaction of Kitty’s colleagues was frustrating but predictable enough, Lee thought. It hadn’t stopped Kitty. No matter how hard she had tried to dissuade her from such debates, her lover never gave up defending Gimbutas to her colleagues who dismissed the work of the late Lithuanian archaeologist as a science fiction fantasy about prehistoric goddesses.

  In 1978, Gimbutas’s beliefs about Minoan culture were challenged by a team of Greek archaeologists who announced they had found evidence of human sacrifice at a Minoan site near Archanes. The skeletal remains of four bodies were discovered by the Sakellarakis team in a temple site at Anemospilia. Three of them, a woman and two men, were thought to have died in an earthquake. The woman was found lying face down; one of the men was face up, his arms protectively raised in “the boxer position” common to earthquake victims attempting to ward off oncoming blows; and the other found face down in the hallway of the temple. It was the fourth body that led to the Sakellarakis team’s claim that human sacrifice was practised at Anemospilia. This victim, a male whose age was pinpointed at twenty-eight, was found lying on his side on a small raised platform (which the Sakellarakis team call an altar), his left leg bent so far back that his heel appeared to touch his thigh, leading John Sakellarakis to conclude that his feet had been bound behind him.

  A knife was found near the chest of this victim, and the bones on the part of his skeleton touching the ground were white. John Sakellarakis conjectured that this meant the blood had left the body before the quake occurred.

  During my stay in Anemospilia, I examined the artifacts excavated by the Sakellarakis team and concluded that we do not have definitive proof that this site was a temple. (1) It is smaller than most Minoan temples and the pattern of three small rooms is atypical. (2) There is no evidence that the small raised area on which the alleged sacrificial victim was found is an altar. Most Minoan altars were made of wood, and wood disintegrates, while this raised area consisted of stones. (3) The alleged sacrificial knife is larger than most knives used by the Minoans and is, in all likelihood, a spear. This is suggested by the two vertical slots located about two-thirds down the length of the blade from its tip. And rather than being placed next to the victim’s body, as the Sakellarakis team suggests, this instrument could have fallen onto the victim’s body during the quake. (4) Contact with the earth could have kept the bones white by protecting them from full impact of the fire that followed the earthquake. To a
rgue as Sakellarakis and his team do that the blood had been drained from the body during the sacrifice is a doubtful proposition.

  To sum up, no one has found conclusive evidence of human sacrifice in Anemospilia or anywhere else in Crete. Gimbutas and other archaeologists have interpreted the designs on Minoan artifacts as evidence that Minoan palaces, far from being sites of sacrifice, were cult centres administered by women priests and used for the celebration of the rituals connected to the harvest. It is possible that some human sacrifice may have been performed at the end of the late Palace period as a way of warding off earthquakes. Yet it would be foolish to construct the culture of the Minoans as resembling the warlike society of for example the Mycenaeans. It is more likely that it was based on the beliefs that shaped the Neolithic society of Catal Huyuk in Turkey, which James Mellaart excavated in the early 1960s. Mellaart claimed that the evidence showed there had been no warfare at Catal Huyuk for over 1,500 years.

  This, then, is my conclusion: that unless new findings are uncovered in Anemospilia, Minoan culture remains a possible model of a prosperous, artistic society that did not rely on warfare to further its agendas and did not regularly practise human sacrifice. Archaeologists who oppose this theory may be objecting for reasons of ideological bias. To believe more humane cultures existed in the past is a gentle heresy, but it is a heresy nonetheless.

  Setting aside Kitty’s essay, Lee rose and poured herself a fresh glass of retsina. She could never be as eloquent as Kitty, she thought sadly. Or as good. She was the jealous one who had let Kitty down, and Kitty hadn’t stopped believing in her. But it was too late for regrets. She gulped the wine and stood at the window frowning up at the Acropolis. Well, she wasn’t trying to change the minds of traditional archaeologists. Her audience of English expats would be more easygoing, and hungry for news from an English-speaking lecturer. Still they would want her to stick to the premise: Was there a blood sacrifice or not in Minoan Crete? That’s what they’d want to know. It was the same old tiresome focus on violence.

  The next morning, Luce awoke early. She fed the cat a tin of tuna and put the drops in his eyes. The antibiotic seemed to make him drowsy and he was soon asleep on her pillow. She left the window to the light well strategically open and set out to explore the Plaka. Leaving the hotel, Luce began making a list of the city’s disagreeable features: First, the hotel washroom which doubled as a shower stall and displayed a tacked-up sign in English ordering her to deposit used toilet paper in the waste basket. It seemed as if the plumbing hadn’t changed since Asked For visited Athens. And then the smoggy, yellow light—the pollution in Athens was worse, far worse, than in North American cities; the shaggy-haired men who called to her to eat in their outdoor tavernas; the churning tourist warren of the Plaka, with its shop windows displaying huge glass eyes to ward off evil spirits along with racks of postcards featuring malicious centaurs gleefully clutching their huge, tulip-shaped penises.

  Walking up a high, noisy road by the Acropolis, Luce realized she had taken a wrong turn. She had strayed farther than she intended from the cramped lanes of the Plaka. Puzzled, she stopped at an espresso bar to get her bearings. She reached into her knapsack for her map of Athens and by mistake, pulled out the manuscript with Arabic writing in its acid-free folder. She had packed it in her knapsack that morning, intending to study it in some quiet, protected place. She would soon be coming to the end of Asked For’s journal, and she was curious to see if she could find a connecting thread to the mysterious document. She set it on the table and brought out her map. Satisfied that she knew where she was, she fished again in her pack for the photocopy.

  At the other tables, men and women were reading newspapers and chatting to one another in Greek. At the table next to her, an older woman in a tight-fitting jersey sat alone, a guidebook on her lap, glancing about the room as if she was waiting for someone. She turned to look as a blue-shirted Greek boy shot by on a motor scooter. Luce watched the woman gaze after him as the noise of his machine dwindled into a mosquito-like wail.

  What do women that age long for, she wondered—husbands, divorced or dead? Or lovers gone? Or possibilities never considered? Do they resent it that men’s eyes don’t seek them out but follow the young girls instead, while their hearts long to be with the boys who float like bright butterflies down an Athens street, shirt sleeves flapping in the breeze, their scooters roaring out a sooty trail behind them? Or is it their younger selves they miss?

  She turned to the next entry by Asked For Adams.

  July 12, 1797

  I put out a plate of bread to catch a husband.

  To amuse myself, yesterday I went with Stavroula to the shrine to Aphrodite on the Acropolis. She told me that the young girls of Athens leave offerings there when the moon is new, hoping the goddess will catch them “a pretty young husband.” It was not as hot, and I followed my little tutor up through the ruins of the old Greek agora. We stopped by the temple of Theseus, a novel sight in the midst of a cornfield, until she grew impatient and ran off to join a troop of older girls going up to the Acropolis. I lingered, awestruck, thinking of the ancients who trod there long before the first Adams set foot in the New World.

  When we fell in step again, Stavroula whispered that the other girls came from rich families, and that it is not usual for Athenian women to go about in public unaccompanied by a chaperon. Certainly, this troop of beauties seemed happy to be on their own. They talked loudly in self-assured voices and, like the Venetian Macaronis, jingled and tinkled prettily because their necks and arms were covered with strings of gold coins.

  The girls directed astonished looks at my Paris walking dress whose Grecian banding had been inspired by their dresses. The two embroidered bands—on their hips and beneath their breasts—gave them the appearance of having a double waist. I am certain I looked as odd to them. It was a queer sensation to meet exemplars of fashion in a cornfield.

  The girls and I left the old marketplace and traversed a path winding above the whitewashed huts of Athens. From the path, it was possible to look down on the courtyards of the ramshackle houses whose walls are made of mud and pieces of marble from the ruins.

  It was cooler up here. A fringe of shrubbery hugged the Acropolis and doves flew in and out of this tangle of greenery. On either side of the path, poppies and mimosa bobbed their heads among the blond grasses.

  Finally, high on the northwest side of the craggy hill, we came to a small shrine carved in the rock. Standing at a polite distance, Stavroula and I watched the girls set their plates on the grotto ledge. Some girls added salt and honey to their dainty offerings of bread. When they left, we went up to the ledge ourselves and Stavroula gave me a conspiratorial smile as she took one of their plates and tossed its contents away. Then she made her own ritual, using her mother’s bread. I did the same, feeling hot and uncomfortable.

  The breeze had dropped, and the heavy, still air pressed on our skin. I stared longingly at the Aegean in the distance, glistening in sheets of turquoise and dark blue. The sun’s position told me it was the mythic hour in this land—the hour just before the sun vanishes, when all things shine golden in the pale light. I heard a sudden rustle in the bushes, and flocks of crows flew up above our heads, cawing noisily. Startled, I spun about and there, shimmering in the hazy air, I saw the torso of a male figure glistening like a plant wet with dew. The apparition was unclothed, and its male instrument stood up large and imposing.

  I thought of what Jacob said about the beauty of our physical selves. As I stared, a fierce, hot wind blew up the slope of the Acropolis, making my sleeves flap and my hair stream back from my face. The wild gust filled me with exultation, but the next thing I knew the wind had dropped and all was still and sultry as before. Father’s moral peevishness lingers in me, and I turned away from the hallucination telling myself the heat had affected my senses. I said not a word to Stavroula and began to hurry down the slope. She called after me, but I did not wait. The path was wider on this part of
the slope. I heard voices nearby, and saw a white horse tethered to a fig tree. And on the grass beside it someone had left behind a single high-heeled shoe. I left the path and pushing aside the branches found myself in a small grove. Behind a large, pale rock, Jacob lay as if dead. For a terrible moment, I thought of Father abed in Venice. I ran towards my friend, panting from fear.

  “Wake up! Please! Are you sleeping?”

  Drowsily, he opened his eyes. When he saw who it was, he gave me a delighted smile.

  “Dear girl! Is something wrong?”

  I could not help myself: in my excitement, I began to describe my vision, and he listened thoughtfully. While I talked, Monsieur Gennaro came walking out of the bushes, shouldering his telescope. Monsieur Papoutsis followed, holding an umbrella above the painter’s head.

  “Dom! Come here!” Jacob called out before I could stop him. “Asked For has seen the Apollo Belvedere!”

  I did not see the Apollo Belvedere. I know this from having viewed the god’s likeness with Father in the Vatican museum. The statue of the young Apollo wears a fig leaf with serrated edges like the leaves of Quincy maples. And aside from the frozen waves of marble on its head, the Vatican statue lacks bodily hair. I saw something else, and my vision displeased Monsieur Gennaro.

  “Her vision lacks the calm grandeur of the ancients,” he said. “It is a crude pagan thing.”

  “Ah, but Asked For is opening up to the beauty of the world, Dom,”Jacob said. “It doesn’t matter whether her apparition was pagan, surely?”

  Our painter friend grew surly at this, and his eyes followed me, as we returned to our lodgings, in a way I found humiliating.

  First Inquiry of the Day: What is the meaning of my vision?

  Lesson Learned: If there is a lesson to be learned from seeing a naked god on the slopes of the Acropolis, I do not know it, and neither does Monsieur Gennaro. But I cannot help thinking that if this pagan god turned his back to me I would see that he had buttocks like Jacob Casanova.