Collected Novels and Plays (49 page)

He has told (Dora) & tells Sandy: It is my despair to have grown up without a language.

He had a hollow, radio announcer’s voice, no sooner acquired than regretted, no sooner regretted than complicated by a slanginess remembered from the streets, which made his listeners wince. Yet people were swayed by him. This intermittent wrongness of tone heightened their sense of him as mouthpiece for something mysteriously
right
. An oracle.

(“Americans are struggling to express themselves in a language they scarcely know.”—an English novelist.)

Sandy’s ideas:

(Blank minutes follow. I study the wall. Help! Then, God be praised, Chryssoula saves me. Yesterday I was brusque with her, today I gave her a full ½ hour. By its end she was sitting on my lap alternately deploring my rough cheek—Why? Perchè una barba? É brutta!—and passing candies sucked pale from her mouth into mine. My legs are still numb. I have had to invent a fiancée in America, to whom I am being true, lest I wake one day
to find C. toute entière beside me.)

What Sandy hasn’t known is how much he means to Orestes, & always has meant. O.: “This is what I most regret about being so much older. Missing you, missing your childhood.” (S. is discovering that childhood has a peculiar attraction for literary people.) O.: “But who can say? Now may be the right moment after all. Let me look at you. What a guy!”—breaking into the laughter of one puzzled by his luck.

Sandy responds—how can he help it? That they are brothers means they
have
to love each other—what else are brothers meant to do? He overlooked a slight discomfort, a slight constriction of guilt that comes, he feels, from not having prepared a place in his heart worthy of this foreknown companion. Out of good will, in a twinkling, the niche is made and, as it were, predated.

Avoid a “pattern” where S is concerned—his rejecting the love & trust of others. Let him remain gentle, full of sympathy, as if he & his author were quite different people. Aren’t they? Would
he
have failed Orestes (or Lucine, or even Chryssoula)? Would he have loved Marianne who for all her charm & experience wanted only

Throughout these days O. and S. are abnormally open to each other. 1st words & gestures of magic figures shaped in darkness, or during a long spell of fasting.

Eleni
Houston was the single topic Orestes had resolved they would not discuss. “It is not for me to interfere with your feelings about home.”

He let Sandy feel, however, that an inner necessity, quite divorced from whatever had gone on in his stepfather’s house, had driven him forth into the world.

(Use table-talk, pp. 29-30.)

On state occasions, when the golden cloud

when dressed in the golden cloth of what he desired to be, Orestes could believe that an inner necessity, quite divorced … into the world. True, he & his stepfather were not close.
Nevertheless
He reminded his mother of 1000 sorrows & deprivations. And she him. During crucial years she had bent all her energies upon Americanizing herself, a process he came to scorn after it had borne fruits. Both he & Sandy were
used to seeing her impulsively kissed, held at arm’s length and declared, by a red-, white-or blue-haired neighbor, “just like one of us, Helen, angel, that’s what you are, you cute thing!” The point is that Orestes had
not
broken with Houston. He wrote letters, sent gifts, went home a number
of years for Xmas; had been the 1st to speak the names of Homer & Shakespeare in little Sandy’s hearing. Yet it seemed
always that somebody else was doing these things, while he, Orestes, stayed aloof in self-imposed exile. The larger-than-life Orestes acted not from 20 trivial motives, like press of work or shortage of money, but from one profound one. Why had he left home, did Sandy Hamlet wonder? Why else but that the scripture might fulfilled—scripture in O.’s case being the deeds of a composite literary hero (beginning with Agamemnon’s son & visiting like a
pollen-gathering bee Perseus, Oedipus, etc.) whose predicament in varying forms & varying levels of consciousness filled many an avant-garde volume read by the

Characteristics of cloth-of-gold: Ugly seams. The wearer’s skin suffers.

O. wore myth day & night like an unbecoming color. “I am Orestes, Perseus, Hamlet, Faust.” And, in the piping whisper of a child, unheard by him: “I am Pinocchio.”

Ah, but it made him so happy, made the ills that befell him bearable.
Myth
Metaphor formed like ice between him & the world. Backwards, forwards, sideways, he glided, spiraling, curvetting … The leaves close in as we retreat. Their colors—reds, yellows, a mottled purple—are those of fats & vital organs.

My God, it is sunset—where did the day go?

My
dear Mrs N.,

I low can I ever thank you and Mr N. for tell you & Mr N. what a good a delightful Mr N. what a really enjoyable
How can I possibly thank

Dear
est
Lucine

A few lines to
say I am thinking about you. Arc you all right? I wish so much
wonder if you are still afloat, & where. Part of me wishes very much it I had sailed away with you.
Do you think you will ever come back?
Will this reach you in Athens? What is it like in summer? (You needn’t tell me; I know.) Here nothing changes appreciably. A drizzle of Danes has descended. Giorgios caught an immense
frowning Fish which everybody was invited to share. He wants to be remembered. So does the Enfant Sick. I guess I’m at work.
Am I remembered?
Please send me a card.

Well, those are written, plus one to Houston, sealed in last night’s bottles & flung into the foaming tide. A whole day (8.vii.61) frittered away. I still feel quite awful, capable, even, of returning by fall, as promised in my letter home.

Those gallons of wine! George! Those girls—I never want to see
any
of them again. Least of all a voluble Sunflower named Inge who must already have taken 3 of the Enfant’s boys into the pine trees when her whim shifted to the New World. And into me as well she sank her golden teeth. There are marks.

In writing the N.’s I felt stupid & awkward, as if I had wronged
them
, her deputy parents, rather than L.

What I want now is to sketch in the scene of the lemon groves, the panegyri, & make it express a number of things. Among them:

1) The community. The abbot. The light. Music & smells.

2) The rapport between Sandy &

3)

But not today.

9.vii.61

Or today.

This noon, leaving Inge & her friends waiting for the boat to Hydra, I did at least take the 10 minute ferry trip to the mainland & walked the mile or so out to the lemon groves. None of it familiar. Had hoped to find the clearing, the tall (pepper?) trees under which the musicians played, the stones where the fires & spits had been. Not a trace, as after a fairy feast, not even gossamer or the ring of mushrooms. Narrow
earthen paths, rows of trees stretching deep on either side. Blink of perspectives—near, far, near, far—in green, dry heat as I passed.

10.vii.61

The morning of the panegyri found them bathing in the cove below Orestes’ cottage.

It was in a remoter cove that O., swimming one day, had discovered, wedged among rocks, a water-worn, barnacled fragment of statuary: the upper head (brow, eye, curling locks) of a marble youth. He treasured it above all his belongings. From then on, when he swam, magic upheld him. An element in which anything was possible.

(Dora), O., Sandy, Maritsa and the baby. A palmetto sunshade had been put up. They advise Sandy to use it, but he is plunging in & out of the water, charging here & there with the dog. The brown sand is flecked with tar; soon his feet are back. He sees for the 1st time the beautiful “skeleton” of a sea-urchin, its crust of green-or rose-tinted bisque, stippled, as in formal 18th century stucco, with dotted radii diminishing in size toward a
little empty place at the crest.

“Yes, but those are dead stars,” said Orestes. “Look out there! Deep in their cool, luminous heaven live the real ones, revising slow, black, threatening constellations.”

“What are you saying, Kyrie Oreste?” cried Maritsa, and, when he had translated it for her: “Ah! Imagine!”

“Watch out for them,” said (Dora). She removed her bathing slipper
& exhibited a cluster of minute black points sealed beneath the thickened skin of her heel. “Those are from just after the war.”

Sandy reached into the shade to touch the place, wonderingly. Their bodies, Dora’s and Orestes’, fascinated him in ways he hardly knew how to think about.

Seen objectively, Maritsa was shapelier, more sexual, her contours firm & sweet as the melon she now sliced for them. Sandy himself had fine metallic hairs on his arms and legs, he turned a lean white belly to the sun. But what was this? Mere youth. It didn’t give out the
exotic air
sense of alienation between spirit & matter

the romance of accomplished individuality which reached him from (Dora) & his brother.

Orestes’ thin body lay, propped on elbows, knees bent; a locust carved out of oiled walnut. His ungoggled eyes gave back the horizon. What must have happened
inside
him to cause that one white hair among the others sprouting round his nipple? The sunken places above his collarbones, the waxlike glimmer of his shins. Dora—the scant fat forming in pearls, thoughtlessly, between arm & breast, the urchin spines in her foot—a
constellation in negative; a destiny no longer in the heavens, waiting, but
incorporated
, part of her. Her thighs were shelled with
flesh
-an ivory browned more by age than by sun. These bodies woke no desire in Sandy, yet his imagination ran riot through scenes in which they must have participated—separately of course!—in order to achieve

yet he yearned to a degree that shocked him, to possess their memories of action & delight, so deeply incorporated now in those 2 forms rising from the sea, streaming with brilliant drops that paled to salt in the day’s dry blaze.

(The sea of the Past. Lot’s wife?)

The baby was still ¾ spirit. It flickered fatly, sweetly, a fire in their midst. Orestes would not tire of playing with it, taking it back into the water on his shoulders. A look on (Dora)’s face struck Sandy. Was it possible that, 20 years older than O., she saw in him—whose attempts at play impress S. as so much nostalgic artifice—reserves of innocent animality?

(Sharpen & reinforce this attraction she feels. The showdown is only hours away.)

A revery without end: If X. were young, if I were old. If I were young, if Y ….

They had stopped warning Sandy. He lay in the sun & burned.

The Panegyri.

They set out in mid-afternoon. Only Kanella remained behind, tail hopefully wagging even as they glided forth from the dock. A sheer whitish blue rippled on the water like silk. Kosta steered. Maritsa & Orestes, holding a child apiece, sang songs. From the stern, beaming like royalty, Dora & Sandy watched the gold-green shore approach.

When they landed, “We’ll start ahead,” said (Dora), taking Sandy’s arm. They followed a narrow earthen path.

These two were gay & easy together, pleased with each other’s (reality) which O.’s advance descriptions had done little to prepare them for. He still knew best, of course, knew them—didn’t he?—better than they would ever know themselves or one another. Their friendship was but some slight retrograde expertise in the wider heavens of Orestes’ life, from which they were to
guide shine down on
return his light.

(And time will prove him right. When O. no longer gives it meaning, their intimacy fades.)

At the festival. Continuous music, warm gusts of rosemary & fat, lambs on spits, sun-shafts turning the blue smoke to marble. It would last hours and was paced accordingly. “What we must first do,” said Dora when the others had caught up, “is to pay our respects to the abbot.”

This person stood black and bearded in the shade of the largest pepper tree. He offered Sandy a strong, white, soiled hand & fixed him with professionally piercing eyes, speaking all the while.

Orestes (translating): He welcomes you to Greece & wants to know your age. He won’t believe you’re 20, you look 16, kid. I’ll tell him 18. They thought I was 25 until I grew a moustache. Ha ha!

(Somewhere else: “Ha ha!” exclaimed O. on a rising inflection, the notes exactly a fourth apart, as at the end of Manon’s Gavotte.)

Tiny glasses of ouzo were served, followed by tumblers of cold water & rose-flavored jam on spoons. The entire clearing, trees, glimpses of hills and sea, took on the air of an interior (frescos, mirrors) where, in the absence of the saint whose Day it was, a man in long black robes had agreed to play host.

After further civilities the guests were released.

O. (as they moved away): He wanted to know where you were going after Greece, Sandy. I told him, back to America. He would never have believed a boy your age had money & freedom to travel so extensively.

Sandy: Who misrepresented my age to him in the first place?
Sandy nodded. At that moment he couldn’t imagine leaving (Diblos), let alone arriving in Cairo, Bombay, Yokohama!

A Greek shopkeeper in Houston had given him 5 lbs. of caramels wrapped in colored papers “for the children of Greece.” These now, alerted by Orestes, came up in droves to claim them, stopping, however, a courteous meter from the young foreigner.

O.: They’re shy. In Greece the stranger is a god. Especially if he’s blond & blue-eyed. Hey, fella, (slapping Sandy on the shoulder) you’re turning rosy, too!

Each child waited gravely for his sweets &, on receiving them, broke into a slow smile.

O.: That’s the smile of the kouros, the archaic smile. Pose a Greek child for a snapshot, his shoulders lift like wings, his arms stiffen at his side, and he smiles. How full of pride that smile is! It’s the 1st photograph of Man taken by his new young god—before they’ve learned how to torment one another.