Dinner with Persephone (25 page)

“Y
ou bitch, you betrayed C. C. Capwell!” I hear as I set out for the Aegina harbor from the house of the brilliant poet where I am a guest. She is one of the world’s great talkers, a coloratura teller of jokes in many languages, and the only true mystic I have ever known, since her mysticism emerges from a sense that the divine is unknowable, and is uncorrupted by the secret certainties of underlying dogmatism that make so many mystics seem like spiritual pornographers, covering with a transparent black negligee an anatomy they know in advance is naked. She is also a connoisseur of soap operas, and rails joyfully in Spanish, French, Greek, Russian, and English, against whoever plots against her preferred characters, such as C. C. Capwell.

All along the way to the harbor, I am congratulated with golden smiles on the election of Clinton. “It is good for the world that you have such a clever, sincere, youthful president,” someone says to me. I stop for a coffee, which comes accompanied by paper sugar packets stamped with images of Delphi and the theater at Epidaurus. Moored at the harbor’s edge are rows of cleanly painted blue-and-white boats, some with the general talismanic names of Greek
boats,
Tria Adelphia
, Three Brothers,
Zoodokhos Pygi
, Life-Giving Spring, named after the icon of the Virgin Mary sitting in her fountain, and
Agios Nikolaos
, after the patron saint of sailors. Local names crop up too, like
Agios Nektarios
, and
Aphaia
, the daughter of Zeus, whose temple I am going to visit today. I can’t find my waiter, preoccupied probably with the late coffee-and-newspaper crowd, so I go inside to see if I can order a spinach pie to go with my coffee. A thin, flat-faced man gets up from behind the bar. Is anyone cooking yet, I ask, but he only looks alarmed. I try English and nothing happens. “
Alvanos
,” he says, only Albanian, and I see he has the starved look Albanians here don’t seem to lose, even when they gain weight, the eyes that meet yours as a fish’s would, observant, but without creating a human link. The lives of deprivation and violence Albanians live in Albania—Tirana is said to be ruled by gangs who thrive off petty theft and murders—and the mistrust with which they are regarded here, seen as importing criminality across the border, have created this distinctive expressionless look. I thank him, catching sight of a poster behind him of Clark Gable carrying off Vivian Leigh in
Osa Pernei o Anemos
, and head for the bus to Aphaia’s temple.

The stationmaster is playing cards, but breaks off his game to wave me toward a bus with two pairs of huge eyes painted on the right- and left-hand sides of its windshield. A few people are on the bus, a handful of schoolkids, some old ladies in black with town marketing, an old man with the unwieldy materials for some carpentry project. The driver puts a small boy down at a field across from a tiny school no bigger than a mountain chapel. A girl of about twelve is sitting behind the driver, who talks and laughs with her. When she steps off the bus at her stop, the driver remembers he had a favor to ask her. He calls out to her, reaching down between his feet, and hands her a carton of eggs, saying, “Wait just a minute, my golden one. Would you please drop these off with my wife?” We drive through groves of pistachio trees with their childlike scale, Aegina’s chief crop, along the steep narrow roads island geography
compels. Near the temple, there is a passage so narrow that cars can only go single file, and eight cars retrace their passage back downhill to give the bus the right-of-way.

Pine trees frame this temple of Zeus’s daughter, their blue-gray cones hanging from their branches like votive offerings. A woman is feeding a small colony of hens and roosters at the foot of the temple. My entrance fee is waved aside in President Clinton’s honor. It is a mark of the change of seasons that the tourists today, except for me, are all Greek. “Mama,” shouts a little boy, racing ahead, “can we go inside the temple?” The chance to linger and circulate, rare at temples during the high tourist season, tempts me to think about what makes this temple seem so brilliantly sited. Height is important—you must have the sense of revelation that height gives to the religious, the sense that you have arrived as a pilgrim at a place where many perspectives meet, where you can come close to seeing everything. Sound is equally important, at every temple site I have visited. A rarefied silence, broken by the powerful secret language of the winds in the pine trees, as there is here, or the grand recitations of the waters, as at the site on Thasos. The gods must always speak at a temple site, in sounds we can hear but not understand, sounds we can only interpret. And finally there must be a sense not only of revelation in the site, but of mystery, of continuation into places you can’t see, into unknown worlds. Here the waters of the narrow Saronic Gulf move beyond the mountains of Aegina, between them and the Greek mainland to a destination you can’t see; blue water and light stretch to infinity, as soundless boats sail past, backed by immovable cliffs that look like temples themselves, pieces of divine design. This is a place that makes the world seem like a dream, a real world that is also a dream of itself.

A mother and two children who are highly amused with themselves stop to talk to me. “We just jaunted over for the day from Piraeus. I left my husband a note to tell him we would be in Aegina, I just left him a note, American style, American style,” the wife says delightedly. The little girl is hungry, so I give her an apple, as she
prattles about the horse-drawn carriages on the harbor, pretty little pastiche hansoms, pulled by horses whose bridles are garlanded with flowers, and who look a bit like modern actresses attempting nineteenth-century costumes. In the evening in the streets behind the port you can see them going home to their drivers’ small pastures, no longer public, but private horses. The little girl’s ambition is to ride in one, just like a blond actress named Aliki, “our national star,
i ethniki mas star
,” in her movie called
Holiday in Aegina.
The little boy, wearing the comically adult-looking glasses of Greek children, is cheerfully restless. He darts over and hugs his mother, then rushes off again to dangle from a tree. His mother calls out patiently, “Get down, Bobbi,” but he changes his name in midair. “I’m not Bobbis,” he says, “I’m Archimedes, I’m Archimedes.”

On my way back to Aegina town, I have quite a lot of trouble not getting married in one village, where a lonely taverna keeper announces that he, after years of bachelorhood, may very well be interested in getting married, and has fixed on me as his choice. Having disentangled myself, I am followed through the village by a man on a motorcycle, who says to me, “Here’s what I want to do. Let’s go for a ride in the mountains and see the scenery and then have sex.” I explain I have a
desmos
, a bond elsewhere, and he says, “What, a husband?” No, I say. “Then why not have two? Look how handsome I am,” he says, running his hands over his torso. “Don’t you find me handsome?” he asks, with the uncanny sophistic skill of the Greek
kamaki
, or harpoon, as these boys are called, for asking questions whose answers can only be interpreted as either insults or assents, and used to achieve the desired result. I walk away from him through the village and take a stand at the bus stop, trying not to laugh, because I am remembering a folk song about the klephts, the idolized Greek bandits, who harried the Ottoman Turks when they were good and harried the Greeks when they weren’t. “The klephts are sitting, sitting beneath the plane tree./They wash, they groom themselves, and look at themselves in the mirror./They observe their fine features, they observe their gallantry./Demos
takes one look, the
pallikaria
five, and Kostas the proud looks fifteen times./And out of his pride and out of his gallantry/he doesn’t go home in the evening, he doesn’t go back to his family,/but stayed up in the mountains and high ridges.”

When the
kamaki
has given up, I take a path up to the cottage-sized chapel overlooking the sea, knowing I have time before the bus comes. A tiny taverna is perched like a bird’s nest on a ledge overlooking this village’s dramatic sea, going up in white flames on the rocks. Strange how in one village the sea shows war, in another, peace. A woman is baking bread in an outdoor oven and a very pregnant dog walks up the path with me. The chapel is Saint John’s, as its principal icon shows. The door is loosely fastened by wire, and inside, the debris of God’s housekeeping that women do here is scattered on a small table—fresh candles, matches, olive oil, and at the foot of the altar, a tiny vase of fresh flowers. Outside there is a small cemetery. The graves are decorated with plastic wreaths of flowers, and set into the tombstones are old photographs of country couples, the men in peaked caps, the women with black shawls draped over their heads. Marble tablets lie flat over the graves, carved with funeral messages, looking as if someone had left a note for the deceased on a memorandum pad. The very banality of the messages—“We think of you far away, and wish you a good journey”; “Though you are gone, you are never out of our thoughts”—is a measure of being alive. Only the living can enact banality, it is out of the range of death. The coffins, I think, must have been brought up here over this rough, hilly track by donkey carts.

In the afternoon, I meet my Aegina hostess and her other guests for the last swim of the season; the water temperature is changing, from the slight champagne chill the Aegean has even on the hottest summer day, to hint at an approaching numbing coldness. We eat cheese pies and drink one of the stony Greek whites, a laconic wine, on a beach known for a single Doric column that overlooks it. This beach was familiar to Samuel Gridley Howe, the husband of the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” who took part in the
Greek War of Independence, and found employment for the hungry in building a mole here, which still does its work. When Howe’s project was finished in 1828, he wrote in his diary, “I have enriched the island of Aegina by a beautiful, commodious, and permanent quay, and given support to seven hundred poor.” The passing of the afternoon makes a fairy tale for us; as the sun sets, spilling great golden sheaves of light onto the darkening sea, the moon rises, a distillation of pearl, in a perfect balance of day and night—for about a quarter of an hour, we swim between the sun and the moon.

I look around the table at everyone who has just come out of the sea, faces smoothed by the swimming, their lips with the faint unconscious purely physical and private smile that people have when they’ve just been kissed. We have that involuntary physical intimacy that irradiates a group of people who have just finished a beautiful swim. An outsider could look around at us and know what each person looks like after sex. We all look as if we had just made love.

T
he morning paper features an ad for a car called the Passat Macedon, photographed against a backdrop of a marble relief of Alexander the Great riding on Bucephalus—“It has all the qualities to conquer you,” promises the slogan.

Tonight is the anniversary of the student protest against the junta at the University of Athens, the Athens Polytechnic, on November 17, 1973, when the military drove tanks into the crowds of protesters, and several students were killed. I have seen the grave of one of them, buried with honor at the Protonekrotafeio, the great central cemetery. Many people have told me this was the turning point of the junta years, at least symbolically, that this was the moment the junta was seen by both the right and the left wing as an enemy of Greece itself, killing the Greek future. The memory of this day is such a grave one that it is commemorated by an official nationwide school holiday.

A number of people have also told me to stay at home tonight, and as much as possible today, since it is a day when anti-American feeling runs high, since the United States supported the Greek junta and played a shadowy role in planning the coup that put it in place.
Warnings have come from enough people, both acquaintances and real friends, for me to take them seriously. One well-known student participant in these protests, who is now a radio commentator and author, is interviewed in the paper. When asked if the legacy of the 1973 Polytechnic is still alive, he answers, “Yes … like Alexander the Great.” An impossible, and sometimes faintly demeaning, comparison is often drawn between the current generation of students, whose moral world is more ambiguous, and the ones of that moment of stark and utter heroism when what was calculated was sheer risk, not the patient estimation of good and evil embedded in each other that the work of peace requires. But it has always been harder to work out how to live a good life than how to die a good death.

I see on the news that people have been laying wreaths since early morning on the site of the Polytechnic building. The youth vote is being courted on all sides; the opposition party is sending representatives to visit the site and make speeches, the majority party has promised a large donation to restore the Polytechnic building, badly in need of repair, partly because of student riots last year.

On my way to see a friend with a new baby, I buy some quinces to make the most magical of Greco-Turkish dishes, quinces stuffed with lamb, cinnamon, and rice. A neighbor stops me, to admire a necklace I am wearing of multicolored stars. “Is it from Macedonia?” she wants to know; the Macedonia issue is at fever pitch, and the stars the Greeks see at the moment are all stars of Vergina, like the ones from King Philip’s grave treasures, whose outline has been adopted by the new republic for its flag.

On the corner of Hymettus Street, a men’s clothing store offers Yves St. Laurent accessories. In front of the big glass window, a
gria
, an old lady wearing the widow’s black dress, stockings, and head scarf, is selling flowers from brightly colored plastic buckets, and from a huge basket on wheels, sesame-coated
koulouria
, the bread rings that are eaten throughout the Near and Middle East, wherever the Ottomans governed. A man walking home with loaves of bread
is hailed frantically from a car—“
Yia sou
, my Sotiris,
yia sou.
” Sotiris waves back: “How’s it going, mine, how’s it going, you great big one?” Greek affection is possessive; a family is often just called something that translates as “my ones.”