Dinner with Persephone (46 page)

For Penelope, loving and being loved was an unimaginable liberation and joy; for the first time, she understood other people’s previously incomprehensible sense of life as a gift, not a painful ordeal, a waltz on burning coals, that had to be faced every day with hard-wrought bravery and incongruous public cheerfulness. But the innocent transparency of her happiness had unexpected effects. Families are not only personal but political entities; in fact, far from being exempt from politics, family relations in their political patterns are important seedbeds and training models for the conduct of a nation’s political life, one reason that states and state churches struggle so arduously to shape them. What is considered just and acceptable in some versions of family life—as, for instance, ritual mutilation, wife or child beating, refusing women the right to drive or travel on their own authority, the abandonment of unwanted babies, or divorce only on the husband’s initiative—will rarely be penalized by the state, particularly if the practice has been sacralized through theological sanction, and is presented as an expression of God’s will. Penelope’s family was a small-scale empire. Her mother, acting as go-between for her husband, reported that he was angry at Penelope’s dancing whole waltzes with Mavrocordatos, and sitting near him at the dining table, eager for their conversations. Her father was fearfully jealous of Mavrocordatos; “he imagines that you love him.” Penelope replied out of her exaltation that her father was right, that she loved Mavrocordatos with all her heart. Mrs. Benaki
warned Penelope that she must disguise her feeling, telling her her father liked Mavrocordatos very much, “but only on the condition that his daughter will not love him … he wants your marriage, but he doesn’t want you to love …” Penelope’s love was, in terms of family politics, like an important territory declaring to an empire its intention to become an independent state.

Penelope’s parents, having so publicly welcomed Mavrocordatos, began a ruthless campaign to destroy the attachment their tacit permission had helped secure. An exhausting round of fights began. At first Penelope’s mother told her that the marriage was still possible, but that her father was infuriated by their appearing to be in love; but when her mother began to tell her that she had heard rumors that Mavrocordatos had had many adventures with wealthy prospective brides, Penelope realized that her father had turned against the marriage, and that her mother, however erratic her sympathies might be, was his envoy. Penelope asked her mother frankly if she thought Mavrocordatos only wanted her for her dowry. Why else would he want you, her mother replied; her new doctrine contradicted her old doctrine, but that made acceptance of it an even fiercer necessity. The family began to treat Mavrocordatos coldly on his visits, and to restrict even the couple’s brief opportunities to speak. Penelope’s father conveyed through her mother that he was angry she appeared to be suffering exaggeratedly, pale and losing weight, and Penelope prepared herself for a separation, girding herself for a heroic struggle, envisioning either a victory in which she would win her parents’ consent to marry the man she loved, or not marry at all. She devised a way to correspond with Mavrocordatos through a trusted French governess, and prepared keepsakes to take with him to Athens, where he was being sent. She wanted to give him a charm from her bracelet as a talisman. It had been a gift from her parents, and like many parental gifts, it was a declaration of their own intentions, of the life they intended their daughter to have; it was an image of a sailing ship struggling through a tempest of high waves. The legend engraved on the charm read “Thus is life.”

With Mavrocordatos removed from the scene, the Benakis waged a war of attrition against Penelope, with tortuous daily confrontations staged between her and her mother. Mrs. Benaki told Penelope that her idea of marrying for love was simply obsessive, and that her father would never consent to her marriage with a poor man. Her father called her in for private sessions as well, telling her that in her naiveté she could not recognize that Mavrocordatos was only a dowry hunter, and that he knew very well the techniques young men used to make young women believe in their fictitious love. Expertly, he worked to enclose her in the world he saw, the only real world, the world as he interpreted and willed it, from which he did not want her to escape. The tactics he and his wife employed to separate Penelope from her fiancé were models of political coercion, making full use of their material and emotional power over her. The intimate look Penelope’s story gives at the logic of the arranged marriage shows us not only its social workings, but the opportunity it gave to play out emotional politics, unacknowledged family hostilities, favoritisms, fears, desires, revenges. It is not uncommon for family members to dislike each other, and the control over a child’s future as an adult gave an enormous scope for expression of those feelings, particularly half-conscious ones, through the seemingly accidental choice of an incompatible marriage partner, human maneuvering wearing the costume and opulent maquillage of fate.

Even though Penelope considered that she and Mavrocordatos had pledged themselves to each other, that she was in fact engaged to him, her mother one morning peremptorily summoned her to her room, and read her a letter she had written in response to an uncle’s embassy on behalf of a rich young Athenian. “My husband and I are agreed to accept the young man … as far as the dowry is concerned, the sum is 8,000 & We agree that our daughter will live in Athens with the parents of the young man whom she will respect …” She insisted on Penelope’s consent to the wording of the letter, and when Penelope refused, she revised the letter to
read, “My daughter has no objection, but wants to know the young man before we decide …” When Penelope, anguished in her disobedience, but true to her promise to Mavrocordatos, persisted in refusing, her mother told her that it would be her fault if she ruined the future of the man she loved, that her father would fire him from his job. When Penelope told her she preferred to stay unmarried if she could not marry Mavrocordatos, her mother declared that she would marry whomever they chose, and follow the examples set for her in the family. She was insulted, she said, that her daughter was treating her like a woman they knew who had used violence to obtain her daughter’s consent to the marriage arranged for her. There was another conference, in which Penelope’s father informed her that he was firing Mavrocordatos, that if he persisted in visiting them he would be ejected from the house with blows, and that he would break the teeth in her head if she attempted to meet with him. As for Penelope, if she was stubborn in her refusal to marry, she was welcome to remain in the Benaki household for all her life. Eat, drink, and rot, he told her.

Penelope drank her supply of medicinal arsenic, but there was not enough to kill her; she only vomited and convulsed throughout the night. She began to collect, drop by drop, arsenic from her brother’s store, so that she would have enough to ensure her death next time. The impasse came to an end when Mavrocordatos wrote to Penelope releasing her from the engagement they had made between themselves, and asking her to release him. There had been a scene at his firing, and irrevocable insults had been exchanged on both sides, which now made any union between the families impossible. Perhaps he realized that not only would the Benakis not permit the marriage, but Penelope herself was so enmeshed with them that she could not marry without their involvement. Penelope herself seemed to expect him to remain loyal to her in unmarried devotion, while she lived out her days at home, unable either to marry or to leave the Benaki family. She wrote to him in a tone of imperious morality to return her letters and keepsakes, and never
forgave him for what she considered his contemptible betrayal of their love. Her parents, she decided, had been proved right in their views of him and of marriage, and she resolved to marry according to their choice, to live her life as an obedient and honorable wife; as for love, she was so disillusioned that she felt she no longer had the capacity. She had thought during this worst of the struggles that having at first and last experienced love, to have it uprooted from her life meant uprooting her heart as well. As a mature married woman, she noted in her diary that her heart hadn’t been uprooted; it had been killed. “I will no longer seek happiness in life …,” she wrote, “& the dream ended …” She never played “The Dream of Love After the Dance” again, and was almost nauseated if she heard it by chance.

Her father took the family on a trip to Europe partly to recover from the episode, and on the trip Penelope seems almost to have fallen in love with him, as prisoners sometimes do with their captors. “& I saw my father as he was,” she wrote, “a golden heart … large-souled, proud …” If he had seemed merciless when she was suffering so much, it was because he knew nothing of her pain, she concluded. She felt he was superb, and she felt keenly her obligation as a caryatid of the Benaki name.

In the summer, in Lucerne, she encountered a palm reader who had established himself for a few days at the entrance of their hotel. He told her that she was proud above all, and that her arrogant pride would ruin her. When she asked him if a certain interpretation of the lines in her hand meant she would have no great joys, the fortuneteller told her that she herself had little luck in this area, but that her husband would have joys which she would share, although she herself would not often have what her heart desired. A little later, an uncle arrived in Lucerne to tell her family that he had found a fiancé for Penelope. His name was Delta, his family from Constantinople. He held a position with the railroad company of Thessaly, which would lead to a directorship; he was well-educated,
morfomenos
(a word which means, literally, shaped), speaking English, French, and German
perfectly, the linguistic expertise which in Greece was the particular mark of an educated man or woman. He earned a great deal of money, she was told, although he had no personal property or expectation of a large inheritance. He was handsome, charming. Although she must leave Egypt and live with him in Athens—at the time, a less attractive prospect—he was alone in the world, without relatives, so that she would not face the universally dreaded struggles with a mother-in-law over her son’s affections, domestic management, and child rearing. At first Penelope was shocked, unprepared for the reality that her family would actually marry her in the same way they would arrange a business trade, but she had resolved to follow her father’s direction. She wrote her father, away on a business trip, that a marriage based on love no longer mattered to her, and that she promised to consent to any husband he chose. Having promised in advance to marry Delta, she was curious to learn what the man’s first name was. No one knew. Nor did they have any idea what he looked like, and again Penelope was frightened and unnerved that they would so readily marry her to a man of whom they knew nothing except for rumors, most of those produced by associates who wanted to promote him as a marriage candidate. The elders of the family declared that they, in their greater experience, were better judges of marriage partners than their children; but they were prepared to commit her to a man they themselves didn’t know, they were as ignorant of the future groom as she was. She wrote in her journal that what she was consenting to was her own ethical suicide, but that she could not escape it, and that in any case, she could no longer tolerate her mother’s perpetual criticism and seeming malice toward her. The family and Penelope set out for Athens with the momentous knowledge that her fate was to be settled. Penelope, with a sense that Athens might be her future home, was so moved by the sight of the Parthenon that she wept.

Mr. Delta, on first meeting, turned out to be not handsome and charming and free of family ties, but corpulent, unattractive, and far from alone in the world—he had a brother whom he helped
support, and also unexpectedly included in his marriage package a stepmother, the dreaded mother-in-law, the portent of domestic struggles for the Greek bride, the widow whose entire social status and emotional satisfaction depended now on her son. When Penelope married Delta, she was told, the mother-in-law would retire to Constantinople to live, the household would not be shared between them. Penelope, on the first encounter, found Stefanos Delta such an unappealing presence that she despaired, and again weighed the alternatives of continuing to live at home, which she found intolerable, or suicide, or a marriage to this candidate, an idea she found barely supportable. When her mother wished her good night, she told Penelope that her father had liked him so well that he would now refuse to consider another groom; it must be Delta or no one. The thought of engaging in another protracted struggle with her parents, the welcome prospect of freedom from at least her unhappy daily life with them, and the promise she had made to her father that she would abide by his decision resigned Penelope to accepting Delta. He also appeared more sympathetic in their next meetings—kindly, with a saving sense of humor unknown in Penelope’s house, where the family’s sense of the prestige due them ensured that there could be no hint of mocking or being mocked; and he turned out to be a man of scruples, a quality Penelope valued above all.

Before the engagement was officially finalized, Delta requested, as convention demanded, a private conversation with his future wife. The purpose of the interview revealed an unusual sensitivity, which moved Penelope and made her feel that if she could not love him, she at least might be able to trust him. He wanted to know if the marriage was taking place with her consent, if she was being offered against her will. It was a poignant—and futile—question, since the structure of their system of marriage meant that in truth she could only answer “both,” that under this system, neither “yes” nor “no” was true. Ironically, in order to convey to her his honesty and good character, Delta could only reassure her that he didn’t
love her: he wouldn’t pretend, he told her, that he had any feeling for her, but possibly it would come later. Penelope, combining grace and bitterness, excused him from any concern—“We are making a contractual marriage,” she said, “nothing concerned with feelings!” At their engagement dinner, they were seated next to each other, to receive the toasts and good wishes of the families. Throughout the dinner, they correctly addressed each other as “Miss Benaki” and “Mr. Delta.” The next morning, they were taken by Penelope’s father to a photographer, where they posed separately for portraits to be sent to each other’s relatives, so that each set could see for themselves what the future in-law looked like. The
arravonas
was official, that word in Greek which means both engagement and a sum of money deposited as security against the fulfillment of a contract. It is a word with a root so very old that it almost certainly predates Greek literacy; it comes from
arravon
, a word scholars identify as Phoenician, a term from the shipping business for a deposit against the delivery of a ship’s cargo—an appropriate inheritance from that sailing people who probably brought Aphrodite and Adonis to Greece, developed from their own goddess Astarte and her Adonis-like consort; they certainly brought the Western world’s first known alphabet, which was adapted to fit the sounds the Greeks made, as the divine figures were remolded to fit the native imagination of the sacred. As the Greek monks Cyril and Methodius were to the Slavs in the ninth century, bringing them the Greek alphabet, and the new divine personages of Christ and Mary, as well as trade and political alliances that last to this day, so the Phoenicians were to the Greeks. The debt Christianity owes to Semites is owed to Phoenicians equally as to Israelites, both for religious elements incorporated into the figures of Christ and Mary, and above all, for the Greek alphabet, which through Alexander’s conquests became the lingua franca of the Mediterranean, later the language of the New Testament, and the medium of missionary Christianity. I hear the Phoenician word
arravon
often, as the base of the words for fiancée and fiancé, for the adjective “engaged”; when
I hear it, I am hearing the distant voice of Europa, who according to Homer was the daughter of Phoenix, the king of the Phoenicians.