Report to Grego (24 page)

Getting up, I resumed the descent, rejoicing to have the water thrash my face, hair, and hands. Zeus the Descender was falling with all his might upon Earth, his suffocating wife, who split open with cackling laughter and received the male waters.

Soon the sky cleared. The storm had been a violent descent of the Holy Ghost; now, as the cuckoo began to proclaim, it was finished. At that very moment the sun went down. Far in the distance below me I spied the freshly bathed ruins of the Frankish citadel of the Villehardouins at the top of its hill, above Mistra. The entire sky had turned gold and green.

T
he next day, proceeding through orchards and cypress groves, I went as a pilgrim to Mistra, the Greek Pompeii. This sacred hill, the birthplace of modern Greece, possesses all the manifest and hidden charms needed to entice even the most difficult of souls: lemon and orange trees, narrow twisting lanes, half-naked children playing in the streets, women going for water, girls sitting beneath blossoming trees and embroidering. Life has begun to cling to this soil again; it is struggling to reclimb the whole of the ancestral hill. This is Mistra's first zone, the green and inhabited one. Proceed farther and the dusty, treeless ascent begins. Striding through crumbled houses, you reach the charming sun-baked Byzantine churches—Perívleptos, Metrópoli, Aghioi Theodoroi, Aphendikó, Pandánassa. This is Mistra's second zone, and it is studded with churches.

I was thirsty. I entered the Pandánassa convent to have the nuns offer me a glass of water. The courtyard was shining, the cells whitewashed and immaculate, the sofas covered with embroidered woolen blankets. The nuns ran to welcome me. Some were young, others stiff from rheumatism, all inordinately pale bacause they must work very hard in order to subsist. They keep vigils, they pray, and they never have enough food to calm their hunger. When they have a free hour, they bend over their handwork and embroider traditional motifs—tiny roses out of red silk thready crosses, monasteries, vases full of carnations, little cypress trees. You are overcome with sadness when they proudly spread these embroideries before you, as though showing you their dowries. They smile, say nothing, but you know that the bridegroom does not exist.

Pandánassa gleamed in the honey-green twilight like a small Byzantine pyx of ivory, worked with patience and love to house the Virgin's sweetly effluent breath. What unity, concentration, and grace this church possesses, from the cornerstone of the
foundation to the erotic curves of the dome! The whole of the charming temple lives and breathes, peacefully, like a warm animate organism. All the stones, carvings, paintings, and nuns exist as organic ingredients of this convent, as though one midday they had all been born simultaneously, from the same procreative shudder.

I had never expected to find such tenderness and warm human understanding in Byzantine paintings. Previous to this I had seen only fierce ascetic forms holding parchments covered with red letters and calling to us to despise nature and flee to the desert; to die in order to be saved. But now here were splendid colors, here were faces of the utmost sweetness. Christ entering Jerusalem on his humble beast, kindly and smiling, the disciples following with palm branches, and the populace gazing at them with ecstatic eyes, as at a cloud which passes and then scatters. . . . And the angel I saw at Aphendikó, a beautiful stalwart the green color of oxidized brass, his curly hair bound in a wide ribbon. With his impulsive stride and firm round knees he resembled a bridegroom heading for—But where was he heading with such joy and haste?

Just at that moment the bell began to ring softly, sweetly, for the Good Friday vigil. I entered the church's warm domed interior. In the center, covered with lemon flowers, was the epitáphios, the sepulchral canopy, and lying dead upon the lemon flowers, He who is incessantly dying, incessantly resurrected. Once He was called Adonis, now Christ. Pale black-robed women were kneeling around Him, bending over Him, bewailing Him. The entire church smelled of wax, like a beehive. I thought of those other priestesses, the Melissae, at the temple of the Ephesian Artemis; also the temple of Apollo at Delphi, built of wax and feathers.

Suddenly the women's laments, the unbearable dirge, broke out in full force. I knew that human suffering was the force which would resurrect God, but here in Helen's kingdom my heart was not at all prepared to wail. Darkness had not fallen yet; I rose and continued to climb this hill with its ruined mansions, its towers sprawled on the ground, and, as a stone crown at the summit, the celebrated citadel of the Villehardouins. The great fortified gate was open, the courtyards deserted. I mounted the crumbling stairs and reached the battlements, forcing a surprised flock of crows to take wing. I looked down at the fertile plain below me and at the
smoke which rose from the squat cottages; I could hear the creaking of a cart and a song filled with passion. The atmosphere all around me heaved a sigh. Specters filled the air. The blond daughters of Frankish seigneurs rose from the grave, together with the armor-encased knights who came here to the Peloponnesus in the role of conquerers, married Greek girls, became inoculated with Greek blood, and forgot their homeland. Thanks to our dark-skinned women with their raven-black hair and large eyes, the victors were vanquished.

A
few days later I enjoyed another scene. You cross a dry riverbed shaded by plane trees and beflowered by osiers, you climb an austere mountain fragrant with savory and thyme, devoid of villages, people, goats, and sheep—utterly forsaken. Then, suddenly, behind a turn in the terrain, looming unexpectedly before you in the heart of the Peloponnesus is the famous temple of Apollo at Bassae. It is constructed from the same gray stones that compose the mountain, and the moment you face it, you sense the profound correspondence between temple and site. It seems a piece of the mountain, rock of its rock, wedged indistinguishably between the crags—itself a crag, but one over which the spirit has passed. Carved and placed as they are, the columns of this temple express the very essence of all this montigenous austerity and forsakenness. It is as though the temple were the cranium of the surrounding landscape, the sacred mound-circle inside whose sheltered precincts the mind of the site keeps ever-vigilant watch. Here the artistry of the ancients, continuing and expressing the landscape to perfection, does not make you gasp with astonishment. It lifts you to the summit along a human pathway, so gently and dexterously that you do not grow short of breath. You might say that the entire mountain had been longing for eons inside its tenebrous bulk to find expression, and that the moment it acquired this temple of Apollo, it felt relieved. Felt relieved—in other words assumed a meaning, its own meaning, and rejoiced.

Each day as I walked over the Greek land, I realized more clearly that ancient Greek civilization was not a supernatural flower suspended in mid-air; it was a tree that rooted itself deeply in the earth, consumed mud, and turned this mud into flowers. And the more mud it consumed, the more richly elaborate did this
flowering become. The ancients' splendid simplicity, balance, and serenity were not the natural, easily achieved virtues of a simple and balanced race. They were difficult exploits, the spoils of painful, dangerous campaigns. Greek serenity is intricate and tragic, a balance between fierce opposing forces which after a toilsome and prolonged struggle succeeded in making peace with one another and in reaching the point prescribed by a Byzantine mystic-effortlessness. In other words, effort's peak.

The factor which renders Greece's mountains, villages, and soil buoyant and immaterial is the light. In Italy the light is soft and feminine, in Ionia extremely gentle and full of oriental yearning, in Egypt thick and voluptuous. In Greece the light is entirely spiritual. Able to see clearly in this light, man succeeded in imposing order over chaos, in establishing a “cosmos”—and cosmos means harmony.

A little old lady emerged from the custodian's hut next to the temple. She held two figs and a bunch of grapes in her palm. They were the first to ripen on this high plateau and she wished to present them to me as a gift. She was a sweet, thin, jovial old lady who surely must have beamed with radiance in her youth.

“What's your name?” I asked her.

“Maria.”

But as she saw me grasp a pencil to make note of this name, she extended her wrinkled hand to stop me.

“Mariyítsa,” she said with juvenile coquetry. “Mariyítsa.”

Since her name was to be perpetuated in writing, she seemed to want to save her other name, the pet one. This would awaken life's sweetest moments in her memory.

“Mariyítsa . . .” she repeated, as though afraid I had failed to hear.

I was glad to see the eternal feminine rooted even in this most ramshackle of bodies.

“What's all this around us?” I asked her.

“Don't you see? Stones.”

“And why do people come from the ends of the earth to see them?”

The old woman hesitated a moment. Then, lowering her voice, she asked me, “Are you a foreigner?”

“No, Greek.”

Encouraged, she shrugged her shoulders.

“Foreign idiots!” she exclaimed, bursting into laughter.

This was not the first time I saw these old ladies, the ones who watch over ancient temples or famous churches containing wonderworking icons, laugh sacrilegiously at the saints or ancient marble daemons they guard. They associate with them daily, after all, and familiarity breeds contempt.

Old Mariyítsa watched me with satisfaction as I pecked at the pleasantly tart grapes she had given me.

“And what do you think about politics?” I asked, trying to tease her.

“Eh! my boy,” she answered with unexpected pride, “we're very high up here, removed from the world, and we don't hear its racket.”

We
—in other words “the temple and myself.” And she had uttered the word
removed
in a proud tone which meant
superior
. I felt glad. The old woman's remark, even more than the temple itself, satisfied my heart to the full.

I walked to and fro beneath the columns. It had rained two days before and pools of water still lay motionless and clear in the hollows of the broken marble. Leaning over, I saw fluffy white clouds pass like ghosts across the water's surface. I had read that divinity had once been worshiped similarly in the Far East, in water-filled hollows over which clouds passed.

As I was returning to the plain, I saw an old man kneeling on the stones. He was leaning over a channel and watching the water run, his face bathed in inexpressible ecstasy. It seemed as though his nose, mouth, and cheeks had vanished; nothing remained but the two eyes which followed the water as it flowed between the rocks. I went up to him.

“What do you see there, old man?” I asked him.

And he, without lifting his head or removing his eyes from the water, replied, “My life, my life which is running out . . .”

A
ll things in Greece—mountains, rivers, seas, valleys—become “humanized”: they speak to man in a language which is almost human. They do not torment or crushingly overwhelm him; they become his friends and fellow workers. The turbid, unsettled cry of the Orient grows pellucid when it passes through the light of
Greece; humanized, it is transformed into logos—reason. Greece is the filter which, with great struggle, refines brute into man, eastern servitude into liberty, barbaric intoxication into sober rationality. To give features to the featureless and measure to the measureless, balancing the blind clashing forces, such is the mission of the much-buffeted sea and land known as Greece.

To travel through Greece is a true joy, a great enrichment. The Greek soil has been so saturated with blood, sweat, and tears, the Greek mountains have witnessed so much human struggle, that you shudder in contemplating the fact that here, on these mountains and shores, the destiny of the white race—of all mankind—was at stake. Surely it must have been on one of these shores so filled with grace and frolicsomeness that the miraculous transformation of beast into man took place. It must have been on such a Greek strand that Astarte of the multitudinous sowlike breasts cast anchor from Asia Minor and the Greeks, receiving the barbaric and coarsely carved wooden statue, cleansed it of its bestiality, left it with only the two human breasts, and gave it a human body full of nobility. From Asia Minor the Greeks took primitive instinct, orgiastic intoxication, the bestial shout—Astarte. They transubstantiated the instinct into love, the bite into kisses, the orgy into religious worship, the shout into the lover's endearment. Astarte they transformed into Aphrodite.

Greece's spiritual as well as geographical location carries with it a mystic sense of mission and responsibility. Because two continually active currents collide on her land and seas, she has always been a place subjected both geographically and spiritually to incessant whirlpools. This fated location has exerted a fundamental influence on Greece's lot and also the lot of the entire world.

I viewed, smelled, and touched Greece, proceeding all alone on foot, an olivewood staff in my hand and a carpetbag over my shoulder. And as Greece penetrated increasingly within me, I felt with ever-increasing depth that the mystic essence of her land and sea is musical. At every moment the Greek landscape changes slightly and yet remains the same; makes its beauty undulate, renews itself. It has a profound unity and at the same time a constantly renewed diversity. I wonder if this same rhythm did not govern the art of the ancient Greeks, an art which was born in regarding, loving, understanding, and giving concrete expression to
the visible world around it. Look at a, work of the great classical period. It is not motionless; an imperceptible quiver of life pervades it. Just as the hawk when it hesitates at the zenith of its flight, its wings beat and yet to us it appears immobile, so in the same way the ancient statue moves imperceptibly and lives. In one immortal instant which both continues artistic tradition and makes ready art's future course, it holds the threefold flux of time in perfect equilibrium.