“Your Reverence,” I said at that point, seeing that he was changing the subject, “what should we do to prevent this injustice? Command us. Even if you tell us to throw ourslves into a blazing furnace, my friends and I will do so, just so long as justice triumphs.”
The Metropolitan rose.
“Go now with my blessing,” he said, giving us his hand to kiss. “You did your duty. That’s enough. The rest is my affair.”
We left, as happy as could be. “Well done, Friendly Society!” exclaimed my friend, throwing his arms around the third member and myself, who were walking on either side of him.
That Sunday the lawyer married the rich young lady. And we learned subsequently that the Metropolitan had related our visit and indignation to all his friends, doubling over with laughter.
We read all the novels that fell into our hands. Our minds caught fire, the boundaries faded between reality and imagination, between truth and poetry, and it seemed to us that man’s soul was capable of undertaking and accomplishing all things.
But the more I felt my mind opening and pushing back the frontiers of truth, the more I sensed my heart filling and overflowing with grief. Life seemed excessively constricting to me. Unable to fit within it, I yearned for death; this alone struck me as boundless and therefore capable of containing me. One day, I recall, a day when the sun was shining and I felt my body healthy and contented, I suggested to my friend that we kill ourselves. I had already written a long letter filled with despair, a kind of testament in which I bade farewell to the world. But my friend refused, and I had no desire to depart all by myself.
So deeply had I been possessed by this undefined, incomprehensible grief that the day arrived when even my friend became intolerable to me. I began to go out by myself in the early evening to walk along the Venetian walls above the waves.
How divine the weather! What a refreshing sea breeze! And the young ladies strolling with silk ribbons in their loosely flowing hair, and the little barefooted Turks hawking jasmine and passatempo in tender girlish voices, and Barbaláris arranging tables and chairs in the café above the sea so that the goodmen could come with their wives, the betrothed youths with their fiancées, to order coffee, orgeat, and a spoonful of jam, while with well-fed satisfaction they saw the sun go down.
But I saw nothing—neither the vast placid sea, nor the graceful promontory of Aghia Pelaghiá in this distance, nor Stroúmboulas, the pyramid-shaped mountain with the Chapel of the Crucified, a minuscule white egg, at its summit. Nor the betrothed youths and their fiancées. My eyes were clouded by tears, tears not related to any personal grief, for my soul had been thrown into a ferment by two terrible secrets our physics teacher had revealed to us that year. I believe the wounds he inflicted have festered ever since.
The first secret, the truly terrible one, was that the earth, contrary to our belief, is not the center of the universe. The sun and the star-filled heavens do not submissively revolve in circles around the earth. Our planet is nothing but a small and insignificant star indifferently tossed into the galaxy, and it slavishly circles the sun. . . . The royal crown had tumbled from the head of Earth, our mother.
I was overcome with bitterness and indignation. Together with our mother, we too had fallen from our place of precedence in heaven. In other words, our earth does not stand as a motionless lady in the middle of the heavens, the stars revolving respectfully about her; instead, she wanders among great flames in chaos, humiliated and eternally pursued. Where does she go? Wherever she is led. Tied to her master, the sun, she follows. We too are tied, we too are slaves, and we follow. So does the sun; it is tied also, and it follows. . . . Follows whom?
In short, what was this fairy tale our teachers had shamelessly prated about until now—that God supposedly created the sun and moon as ornaments for the earth, and hung the starry heavens above us as a chandelier to give us light!
This was the first wound. The second was that man is not God’s darling, his privileged creature. The Lord God did not breathe into his nostrils the breath of life, did not give him an immortal soul. Like all other creatures, he is a rung in the infinite chain of animals, a grandson or great-grandson of the ape. If you scratch our hide a little, if you scratch our soul a little, beneath it you will find our grandmother the monkey!
My bitterness and indignation were insupportable. I began to take solitary walks along the shore or through the fields, speeding in order to tire myself and manage to forget. But how could I forget? Bareheaded, I marched and marched, my shirt opened down the front because I was suffocating. Why had we been deceived for so many years, I asked, talking to myself as I proceeded; why had royal thrones been established for human beings and for our mother the earth, only to be pulled down afterwards? Did this mean that the earth was insignificant, that we human beings were insignificant, and that a day would come when all would perish? No, no, I shouted to myself, I refuse to accept it. We must knock against our destiny and knock again, until we open a door and save ourselves.
Unable to endure this any longer, one evening I sought out the physics teacher who had divulged these terrible secrets to us. I went to his house. He was of jaundiced complexion and spoke sparingly, but always in a biting, caustic way. Extremely intelligent, extremely malicious, he had cold eyes and narrow lips that were full of irony. With his low forehead, his hair that nearly reached his eyebrows, he truly resembled a monkey—a sick one. I found him stretched out in a rickety armchair reading. He looked at me and obviously understood my trouble, because he smiled sardonically.
“Why this visit?” he asked. “You must have something important on your mind.”
“Forgive me for disturbing you,” I gasped, “but I want to learn the truth.”
“The truth,” replied the teacher with sarcasm. “Is that all! You’re asking quite a lot, young man. Which truth?”
“That He took clay, breathed . . .”
“Who?”
“God.”
A maliciously dry and cutting laugh unsheathed itself from his narrow, emaciated lips.
I waited. But the teacher opened a little box, took out a piece of candy, and began to chew it.
“Aren’t you going to answer me, sir?” I ventured.
“Yes, I am going to answer you,” he replied, shifting the candy from cheek to cheek.
A considerable time elapsed.
“When?” I ventured anew.
“Ten years from now, maybe even twenty. After your pigmy mind becomes a real brain. Now it’s still much too early. Go home!”
I wanted to cry, Have pity on me, sir, tell me the truth, the whole truth! But my throat was blocked.
“Go home,” the teacher repeated, and he showed me to the door.
On my way back, at the street corner, I encountered the archimandrite who was our instructor in religion, a naïve, saintly man, chubby and extremely hard of hearing. Passionately in love with his elderly mother who lived in a little village far from Kastro, he frequently informed us with tearful eyes that he had seen her in his dreams. He possessed little in the way of gray matter, and from excessive chastity even that must have gone soft. Every time the bell rang and the lesson ended, he hesitated for a moment at the exit, then turned around and instructed us in a sweetly supplicating voice, “Above all, my children, be sure to perpetuate your race.” We, doubling over with laughter, shouted back loud enough for him to hear, “Don’t worry, sir, don’t worry!” I did not like this teacher at all. His mind was a sheep; it bleated away and was incapable of easing any of our anxieties. One day when he was expounding the Creed to us, he raised his finger triumphantly: “There is one God—oonne!—because the Creed states, ‘I believe in oonne God.’ If there were two, it would state, ‘I believe in twwoooo Gods.’” We all felt sorry for him, and no one had the cruelty to object.
On another day, however, I found it impossible to restrain myself. He was teaching us about God’s omnipotence. I raised my pen.
“Sir,” I asked, “is God
able to abolish the fact that this pen ever existed?”
The poor archimandrite turned purple. He reflected for a moment, laboring to find some answer. Finally, unable to do so, he seized the lottery box and hurled it in my face. I jumped to my feet.
“That’s no answer,” I said to him with arrogant seriousness.
He expelled me from school for three days, and that same evening he went to find my father.
“Your son is undisciplined and insolent,” he told him. “This boy will come to a bad end. You’d better tighten up on his reins.”
“What did he do?”
Such and such: the archimandrite recounted the whole story. My father shrugged his shoulders.
“I care only if he tells lies or gets a beating. As for all the rest, he’s a man now, let him do as he pleases.”
This, then, was the archimandrite whom I encountered on the street. As soon as I saw him I turned my head the other way so that I would not have to greet him. Just at that moment I was furious; now at last I knew that he and all his ilk had been mocking us for years, mocking us concerning that part of humanity’s endeavor which was most sacred.
What days those were when the two lightning flashes tore through my mind—what nights! Unable to sleep, I leaped out of bed in the middle of the night, descended the stairs very, very slowly lest they creak and give me away, opened the street door like a thief, and dashed out into the street. Not a soul in sight, doors shut, lights extinguished . . . I wandered through Kastro’s narrow lanes, listening intently to the tranquil respiration of the slumbering city. Sometimes, however, I found several inamoratos singing serenades with guitars and lutes beneath a closed window, their lovelorn dirge, so full of complaint and supplication, ascending beyond the rooftops. The neighborhood dogs would hear, awaken, and begin to bark. But I was scornful of amours and women. I kept asking myself, How can people sing, how is it their hearts are not throbbing to learn what God’s nature is, and where we come from, and where we are going. Passing them as quickly as I could, I would reach the bulwark and breathe freely again. The pitch-black sea, thundering in anger below, dashed rabidly against the ramparts and devoured them. The spray mounted the walls and splattered my forehead, lips, and hands, refreshing me. I would stand above the water for hours, feeling that it, not the earth, was my mother, that only the sea could understand my anguish, because it shared this same anguish, it too was unable to sleep. The sea beats its breast, strikes the shores, is struck in turn. Seeking freedom, it toils to crumble the ramparts which loom before it and to pass beyond them. Dry land is tranquil and secure, simplehearted and industrious. It blossoms, bears fruit, and wilts. But it does not feel afraid, for it is secure in its knowledge that, willy-nilly, spring will rise once more from the soil. My mother the sea, however, is not secure; it neither blossoms nor bears fruit, but instead sighs and struggles night and day.
I heard it, it heard me, and we comforted and encouraged each other until nearly daybreak. Then, afraid that the awakening people might see us, I returned home rapidly and lay down on my bed. A bitter, salty contentment flooded my entire body; I rejoiced that I was made not of soil but of sea water.
One of our nearby neighbors possessed a monkey, a shameless red-rumped creature with human eyes. This neighbor had kept company with an elderly bey from Alexandria, and he had given her the monkey as a keepsake. I saw it crouching on a stool in her doorway every time I passed; it was always shelling peanuts, munching them, and scratching itself to get rid of its lice. Formerly I had stopped to observe its actions and laugh. A caricature of man it seemed to me, a merrily shameless creature devoid of mystery—people might gaze at it unconcernedly and chuckle. Now, however, I was horrified. Unable to set eyes on the creature, I changed route. Was this my grandmother? It humiliated the human being. Ashamed and angry, I felt that a kingdom within me was crumbling to ruins.
This my very first grandmother? These my roots? In other words, was it true that God did not bear me, did not fashion me with His hands, breathe His breath into my nostrils? Was I begotten by a he-monkey who had siphoned his sperm from she-monkey to she-monkey? In short, was I a son not of God, but of the monkey?
My disillusion and indignation endured for months. Who knows, perhaps they endure even now. On one side of the abyss stood the ape, on the other the archimandrite. A string was stretched between them over chaos, and I was balancing on this string and advancing in terror. This was a difficult time for me. Vacation had arrived; I shut myself inside the house with a multitude of borrowed books on animals, plants, stars, and remained bent over them night and day like the man who is perishing from thirst and falls face-down by a brook to drink. I did not go outside. I purposely shaved half of my scalp, and when my friends called to have me go for a walk with them, I stuck my head out of the window, pointed to the half-shaved scalp, and said, “Don’t you see me? How can I go out in such a state?” Then I threw myself into my studies again, listening with relief to my friends’ mocking laughter as they receded into the distance.
The more I filled myself with learning, the more my heart overflowed with bitterness. Lifting my head, I used to listen as my neighbor the monkey screeched. One day it escaped its rope, worked its way into our yard, and climbed the acacia; as I raised my eyes, I suddenly saw it spying on me from between the branches. I shuddered. Never in my life had I observed such human eyes. They were planted upon me, filled with cunning and raillery—round, black, and motionless.
Rising, I pushed away my books. “This is not the way,” I cried. “I am going contrary to human nature, am forsaking flesh for shadow. Life consists of flesh, of meat, and I am hungry!” Leaning out of the window, I tossed the monkey a walnut. It caught the nut in mid-air, broke it between its teeth, discarded the shell, and began to chew away insatiably, looking at me in a sneering manner and yelping. It had been trained to drink wine. I flew down to our storeroom, got a cupful, and placed it on the windowsill. The monkey’s nostrils quivered avidly. Taking a jump, it seated itself on the sill, thrust its snout into the cup, and began to drink and drink, clacking its tongue with satisfaction. Then it threw its arms around my shoulders and embraced me as if it never wished to disengage itself. It smelled of wine and unwashed flesh. I felt its body heat at my throat. Hairs from its mustache entered my nostrils, tickling me and making me laugh. Its whole body pressed against mine, it kept sighing like a human. Our two warmths joined, the monkey’s inhalations followed quietly after my own; we became friends. That night when it left to return to its rope, this embrace seemed to me like a black Annunciation; a dark angel was departing from my window, the messenger of some hairy four-footed God.
The next day I went down to the harbor around suppertime, though previously I’d had no such plan in mind. Stopping at a tavern frequented by fishermen, I ordered wine with a dish of fried smelts as mezé. I began to drink. I do not know if I felt sad, angry, or happy. Everything—monkey, God, starry heavens, human dignity—was tangled within me; it was as though I had placed my hopes in alcohol now to untangle it all for me.
Sipping their wine leisurely in a corner were several fishermen and stevedores, celebrated drunkards all. They saw me and laughed.
“His mother’s milk is still on his lips and he’s playing the man about town,” said one.
“Aping his pa,” offered another. “But he’s got a long way to go.”
When I heard this I became red hot with rage.
“Hey, friends,” I shouted, “come here and let me make you drunk!”
They approached, guffawing. I kept filling the glasses to the brim and we downed them in single gulps, one after the other, without food now. The men looked at me with irritation. We neither talked nor sang, but simply drank down the full glasses and stared at each other, anxious to see who would subdue the rest. Their Cretan self-respect had exploded into flames; these fiercely mustachioed winebibbers were ashamed to be defeated by a beardless youth. Nevertheless, they sank to the floor one by one, while I alone remained sober t
hroughout. So great, apparently, was my pain, it triumphed over wine.
The same thing the next night, and the next and the next. I became renowned throughout Kastro as a drunkard who kept company each night with the shiftless fishermen and stevedores of the waterfront.
My friends were delighted to see me running downhill. They had long since been unable to stomach the fact that I felt no desire for their company and kept myself shut up in my house reading—or, more recently, went out for solitary walks, a book in my pocket. I did not play with them, or gossip, or go courting. “He’ll butt his head against the stars and smash it in a thousand pieces,” they had scoffed, looking upon me with hatred. But now that they saw me drinking and disgracing myself with the barefooted riffraff of Kastro they were delighted. They approached me, perhaps even began to like me, and one Saturday night they brought me by underhanded treachery to the town’s best cabaret, the audaciously named “Combatants of ’21.” A new act had arrived not long before, a troupe of Romanian and French belles who were driving the respectable burghers out of their minds. Each Saturday evening these prudent homeowners slipped secretly into the forbidden, dimly lighted paradise, seated themselves timidly at the most out-of-the-way tables, glanced in every direction to make sure that none of their acquaintances was looking, then clapped their hands to have a painted and perfumed chanteuse come and sit on their knees. In this way these honorable burghers, poor things, were able for a few moments to forget the fault-finding and bickering which accompany a life of virtue.
My friends brought me to the very center and ordered drinks. Along came a fat, billowy Romanian whose sweaty breasts overflowed her unbuttoned silk bodice, a woman of a certain age who knew every trick of the trade. My companions kept refilling my glass; I drank, I became pleasantly happy. Inhaling the acrid female odor, I felt the he-monkey in me awakening. I seized the singer’s slipper, filled it again and again with champagne, and drank.
The next day all of Kastro buzzed with the great scandal: the saint, the sage Solomon with his nose in the air, had—alack! alas!—spent the night carousing in a cabaret, imbibing out of a chanteuse’s slipper. The end of the world! One of my uncles, mortified by his nephew’s ignominious fall, ran to my father and communicated the news to him. But my father just shrugged his shoulders. “In other words he’s a man now, he is beginning to become a man,” he replied. “All he needs to do is buy the singer a new pair of slippers.”