I had a friend who was an attaché in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We had recently made plans to travel together in western Europe. “You’d better take along the fencing crown,” he said to me one day. “We won’t be able to get laurel leaves up north, and we’ll need them for stew.”
I hung the crown on the wall and saved it. Years passed. When our dream finally came true and my friend and I departed for Germany, I took it with me. In two years we had consumed all the leaves in stew.
16
RETURN TO CRETE. KNOSSOS
I RETURNED to Crete for the final summer of my student years. My mother I found seated in her usual place by the window which gave onto the courtyard. She was knitting socks. It was evening, and my sister had begun to water the pots of basil and marjoram. The trellis above the well was laden with bunches of fat, still-unripened grapes.
Nothing in the house had been moved. Everything stood in its place: the sofa, mirror, lamps, and all around on every wall the heroes of ’21 with their thick mustaches, hairy chests, the pistols at their waists, wild, passion-governed souls who were capable of doing—and did—both good and evil, according to how their spleen prodded them. Karaiskakis wrote to Captain Stournáras, “Most valiant brother, Captain Nikólaos: I got your letter; I’ve seen everything you wrote. My prick has trumpets and it also has toubelékia. I play whichever I please!” The toubelékia is a Turkish musical instrument, the trumpet a Greek. These heroes were not pure souls, they were great ones. And great souls are always dangerous.
I often contemplate what a mystery it is that in such dung the blue flower of liberty could have found nourishment and put forth shoots. Hatred, betrayals, dissension, feats of bravery, ardent love for the fatherland, the dance at Zálongon!
Bright and early the next morning I went to find my two classmates, whom I had not seen for four years. The former members of the Friendly Society were unrecognizable. Life had already rolled over them and leveled them flat. When they spoke of the Friendly Society, they burst out laughing. One had a fine voice and was invited to all the marriages, baptisms, and holiday festivities. He ate, drank, and sang. People admired him for his sweet voice and he shared their admiration. He had started along the downgrade; his hands already trembled from too much drink. The other had studied the guitar. He played passionate airs and lively ditties, accompanying his friend. I found both of them well nourished and satisfied, with noses already turning red. They had found employment in a soapworks; they were earning their living, enjoying life, and looking for wives.
I observed them and listened to their words but did not speak—my throat was blocked. Could the flame, then, be reduced to ashes so very quickly? Was the soul so very closely related to the flesh? They knew the dowry of every young girl, where you could eat the fluffiest loukoums, and which tavern had the best wine.
I left feeling sick at heart, as though I had just been at a funeral. The minor virtues, I reflected, are much more dangerous than the minor vices. If these two did not sing and play so well, they would not be invited to parties, would not get drunk, would not fritter away their time, and they might be saved. As it was, singing beautifully, playing the guitar beautifully, they had started along the downgrade.
The next day when I spied them in the distance, I changed my route. I was ashamed because so many friendships and longings had faded in me so quickly, so many great plans to save the world. A wind had blown, and the whole of youth’s blossoming tree had been stripped bare. Wasn’t this tree of youth going to form any fruit, I wondered. Was this, then, the way flotillas set out to cleave the ocean, only to founder in a domestic trough?
Wandering all alone through the narrow lanes, I returned again and again to the harbor to inhale anew the beloved smell of carob beans and rotted citrons. I always had a book in my hand, sometimes Dante, sometimes Homer. As I read the immortal verses, I felt that man could become immortal and that the world’s heterogeneous surface of houses, people, joys, insults—the incoherent chaos we call life—was capable of uniting into harmony.
One day I called at the Irish girl’s house. She had left. I passed by a second time, feeling strangely bitter and remorseful concerning what I had done and failed to do. It was as though I had committed a crime and was returning again and again to circle about its victim. I could not sleep. One night as I was passing through the Turkish quarter, I heard a woman singing an oriental amané in a voice full of woefully convulsive passion. The sound was somber, raucous, very deep; it issued from the woman’s loins and filled the night with despair and plaintive melancholy. Finding it impossible to proceed, I halted and listened, my head thrown back against the wall. I could not catch my breath. My suffocating soul, unable any longer to fit within its cage of clay, was hanging from my scalp and weighing whether or not to flee. No, the singer’s female breast was not being convulsed by love, not by that total mystery the coupling of a man with a woman, not by joy and the hope for a son. It was being convulsed by a cry, a command to break our prison bars of morality, shame, and hope, and to give ourselves over to, lose ourselves in, become one with, the fearful, enticing Lover who lies in wait in the darkness and whom we call God. Listening to the woman’s woefully convulsive song on that night, I felt that love, death, and God were one and the same. As the years went by, I became ever more deeply aware of this terrifying Trinity that waits in ambush in the abyss of chaos—in the abyss and in our hearts. It was not a Trinity; it was what a certain Byzantine mystic called a Militant Monad.
The singer fell silent. I drew away from the wall. The world had risen again out of chaos. The houses grew stable, the streets rolled out smoothly in front of me once more, and I was able to walk. I roamed all night long. My mind remained mute; not a single thought came to reduce my disturbance or change its form. Letting my body guide me, I promenaded along the Venetian walls above the sea. The sky was sparkling, everything brilliantly illuminated. The constellations shifted, slid down toward the west, and vanished; my soul vanished with them. A cool, cool breeze blew from the mountains and entered the houses through the cracks around the windows, cooling the sleeping, sweating inhabitants. I could hear the city breathing in the deep silence.
That night I passed the Irish girl’s house again. I had been walking for hours, and without wanting to or being aware of it, I found myself going in ever-contracting circles which brought me nearer and nearer to the center, to her house. It was as though a cry remained at that house, an imperious and reproachful cry which called me and which I could not resist. Toward daybreak, however, as I was about to arrive once more in front of her closed windows and doors, a lightning flash tore across my mind and illumined it. This was not a cry, it was the woman’s song, the somber, raucous song I had heard that evening as I passed through the Turkish quarter. The song had become deformed now inside me; it had turned into the howl of a lonely, mateless beast which had been abandoned.
Song, beastly howl, the Irish girl’s despairing cry—all became a noose around my neck, strangling me. I recalled a grave saying I had once heard from the lips of an elderly Moslem: “If a woman calls you to sleep with her and you do not go, you are damned. God does not forgive this. You’ll be placed with Judas at the very bottom of hell.” This terrified me. Breaking out into a cold sweat, I headed rapidly homeward, staggering like a wounded animal.
Ascending the stairs on tiptoe so that they would not creak and alert my father, I fell into bed. I was quivering. One moment I felt fiery hot, the next I was shivering. Obviously I had a fever. Sleep came like a poisonous spider and wrapped its web around me. When I awoke toward noon the following day, I was still quivering.
This anguish lasted three days. It was not anguish, it was a heavy lump in the middle of my heart, and my mouth was bitter, poisonously bitter. As I gazed through my window at the acacia in the center of the yard, the fruit-laden arbor, my sister embroidering and my mother coming and going in silence, yoked to her hallowed domestic servitude, the lump rose from my heart to my throat. I wa
s being strangled. I felt as though I had been expelled from heaven. No, not expelled; it was as though I had of my own accord vaulted the celestial railings and fled, an act which I now regretted as I roamed inconsolably outside the closed gates.
On the fourth day I jumped out of bed early in the morning and, without having any clear aim in mind or knowing what I was going to do, took up my pen and began to write.
This turned out to be a decisive moment in my life. Perhaps in this way, on this morning, my inner anguish would open a door for itself and escape. Who could tell (I must have thought this, but without formulating it clearly): perhaps if the anguish became embodied, if words gave it a body, I would see its face and, seeing it, no longer fear it. I had committed a great sin. If I confessed this sin, I would find relief.
I began therefore to mobilize words, to regurgitate the poems, saints’ legends, and novels I had read. Pillaging involuntarily from this one and that, I started to write. But the very first words I placed on paper astonished me. I had had nothing like that in mind. I refused to write such a thing; why then had I written it? As though I had not been delivered permanently from my first sexual contact (yet I was certain I had been delivered), I began to crystallize a tale around the Irish girl, a tale full of passion and fanciful imaginings. Never had I spoken such tender words to her, never felt such raptures when I touched her as those I now proclaimed on paper. Lies, all lies, and yet as I enumerated these lies now on the sheet before me, I began to understand to my astonishment that I had indeed tasted great pleasure with her. Were they really true, then, all these lies? Why had I not been aware of this pleasure in the course of experiencing it? Why, now that I was writing it down, did I become aware of it for the first time?
I swaggered as I wrote. Was I not God, doing as I pleased, transubstantiating reality, fashioning it as I should have liked it to be—as it should have been? I was joining truth and falsehood indissolubly together. No, there were no longer any such things as truth and falsehood; everything was a soft dough which I kneaded and rolled freely, according to the dictates of whim, without securing permission from anyone. Evidently there is an uncertainty which is more certain than certitude itself. But one of these is to be found a full story higher than that ground-level construction of humanity’s which goes by the name of truth.
This insignificant, slightly stooped Irish girl had become unrecognizable in my work, and as for me, the plucked cock, I had glued to myself huge parti-colored feathers which did not belong to me.
I finished in a few days. Gathering together the manuscript, I inscribed Snake and Lily at its head in red Byzantine characters and, getting up, went to the window to take a deep breath. The Irish girl did not torment me now; she had left me in order to lie down on the paper and she could never detach herself from it again. I was saved!
Clouds had covered the sky, the air grown dim; it was raining. The broad vine leaves glistened, the fat grapes beamed glassily. I inhaled the aroma of wet soil, an odor which always reminds me of a newly dug grave. Today, however, the reek of death had been exorcised and my mind was filled with sweet fragrance. A sparrow, drenched from the rain, came and found refuge on the windowsill. On the roof above my head the water cooed and pecked away like a flock of pigeons.
I still clutched the manuscript tightly, as though it were a tiny living creature I did not wish to escape, as though in my fist I held the drenched sparrow—or as though I had made peace with the Irish girl, the ashes had turned back into an apple, and I was holding this apple in my hand.
I went out to the courtyard and walked back and forth in the rain among the flowerpots, tasting in my own right the pleasure felt by a dusty, thirsty tree when the heavens take pity on it and rain begins to fall. Rain has always given me an inexplicable joy—if I weren’t ashamed, I would say a sexual one. I feel as though I were earth, thirsty earth; the feminine element within me, a woman hidden deep down in my bowels, awakes and receives the sky as she would receive a man. . . . I walked exultantly beneath the rain; my heart had been unburdened. I did not think of the Irish lass any longer, except as I had refashioned and solidified her with words. She was reclining now, lying down on the paper. The truth which had been storing up anguish in my breast for such a long time was not the real truth; the real truth was this newborn creature of imagination. By means of imagination I had obliterated reality, and I felt relieved.
This struggle between reality and imagination, between God-the-Creator and man-the-creator, had momentarily intoxicated my heart. “Here is my road, here is my duty,” I cried out in the courtyard as I paced back and forth beneath the rain. Each man acquires the stature of the enemy with whom he wrestles. It pleased me, even if it meant my destruction, to wrestle with God. He took mud to create a world; I took words. He made men as we see them, crawling on the ground; I, with air and imagination, the stuff that dreams are made on, would fashion other men with more soul, men able to resist the ravages of time. While God’s men died, mine would live!
Now I feel ashamed when I recall this satanic arrogance. But then I was young, and to be young means to undertake to demolish the world and to have the gall to wish to erect a new and better one in its place.
My breast was heaving with anguish. Though the old inquietudes sat cowering silently in a corner, new ones began to rise up. The road which suddenly flashed before me was a dangerous and exceedingly steep one. How had it appeared so abruptly, this road which had never occurred to me? Who opened this inner door and beckoned, pointing to it as the supposed gateway to salvation? Did the pain of unfulfilled love do this, or could this door have been opened by the saints from the legends I read as a child? Or by Crete, which, seeing that I could not help her by fighting, placed other weapons in my hands?
In order to change the direction of my thoughts, the next morning, as the Sunday bells tolled and Christians proceeded to Saint Minas’s to do worship, I set out for another shrine. I went to pay my respects to Saint Crete, which in recent years had been exhumed from the age-old soil of Knossos.
Crete’s mystery is extremely deep. Whoever sets foot on this island senses a mysterious force branching warmly and beneficently through his veins, senses his soul begin to grow. But this mystery has become even deeper and richer since the discovery of this immensely versatile and varicolored civilization until then buried beneath the soil, this civilization filled with such great nobility and youthful joy.
I left the city and took the charming road which leads to the new cemetery. Hearing exclamations and weeping, I quickened my pace. A well-bred merchant of our neighborhood, one of Megalo Kastro’s great figures, had died two days before and was being buried in the newly fitted-out cemetery. He had died young; as his friends started to carry him away his wife clung to the coffin and refused to let him leave. I had been passing at that moment. I averted my face to avoid seeing the corpse, because ever since that day in my fourth year when, as you will remember, I observed our neighbor Annika’s bones being removed from her tomb, I have been unable to view a dead body. I am overcome with fear. A hairless, eyeless, lipless Anníka darts out in front of me and rushes forward to seize me, in order to seat me again on her knees. Of course I know this is not true, but I also know that there is something truer than truth itself, and for this reason I grow afraid and quicken my steps every time I see a corpse.
I was surrounded by olive groves and vineyards. The vintage still had not begun; the grapes drooped heavily and touched the soil. The air smelled of fig leaves. A little old lady came along. She halted. Lifting the two or three fig leaves which covered the basket she carried on her arm, she picked out two figs and presented them tome.
“Do you know me, old lady?” I asked.
She glanced at me in amazement. “No, my boy. Do I have to know you to give you something? You’re a human being, aren’t you? So am I. Isn’t that enough?”
Laughing a fresh girlish laugh, she began to hobble along once more toward Kastro.
The two figs were dripping w
ith honey; I believe they were the most delicious I ever tasted. The old lady’s words refreshed me as I ate. You are a human being. So am I. That’s enough!
A shadow fell next to my own. Turning, I saw a Catholic priest. He looked at me and smiled.
“Abbé Mugnier,” he said, holding out his hand. “Would you care to keep me company? I don’t know modern Greek, only ancient: . . .”
“. . . . . .” I continued.
Laughing, we continued to declaim the immortal verses as we proceeded. I learned subsequently that this abbé who laughed and recited, a tuft of gray hair fluttering over his forehead, was celebrated for his sancity and intelligence. In Paris he had led many well-known atheists back to the fold. Endowed with a sparkling mind, he frequented the world, talking and joking with great ladies, but behind this playful, mobile exterior loomed Christ crucified, an immobile, impregnable rock. No, not Christ crucified, Christ resurrected.
The custodian hurried forward to greet us and explain the site. He was a simple, jovial Cretan who wore vrakes and carried a large crook. His name was David. In his many years as custodian and guide at Knossos he had learned much. He spoke of the palace as though it were his home, received us in the capacity of master of the house.