Dinner with Persephone (21 page)

Being here has taught me to be conscious of the metaphors which words are often built from, expressions at the same time of the brilliance and the limitations of each of our perceptions. The
word for government, from which our own word derives, is a marine metaphor, connected to the ancient Greek vocabulary for rudder, ship’s pilot, and the verb “to steer.” I have read on the other hand that the Arab word for politics descends from an ancient Middle Eastern word for horse training. And prayer? The metaphor at the heart of our English word is from the Latin
precarius
, something obtained by entreaty, also the source of the word “precarious.” The Greek word for prayer, on the other hand, means “a wish.”

White gulls fly alongside the ferry, beautiful inscrutable scavengers. I look again at the couple caressing each other, their hands touching faces and thighs in a passion of wishing. Naxos is quiet on this late Sunday afternoon as we sail into its harbor with a view of the Portara, the monumental gate in the square shape of a Greek letter pi that was part of a temple of Apollo. The Venetians who took Naxos as a victory prize after the Fourth Crusade were said to have used remnants of the temple to build the fortress castle which was the nucleus of Naxos town. It is their presence that is most marked here, in the Venetian colonial architecture scattered through the countryside, in the small-scale medieval town they built and lived in as seigneurs, establishing a feudal system that was ended only after the Turkish conquest, in the Roman Catholic cathedral and uneasy Catholic coexistence with the Greek Orthodox. The Cretan novelist Kazantzakis was sent to the school operated by Roman friars here in what is now the island archaeological museum, although his father harbored dark suspicions that the friars were trying to convert him.

The Portara was also supposed to have been where Dionysus, born on Naxos, appeared to claim the abandoned Ariadne. Or at least one of them, since in the Greek world of relentless dualisms, there seem to have been two Ariadnes, one of whom died when abandoned by Theseus, and was worshipped with funeral liturgies and mourning chants, and another who survived the abandonment and was married to Dionysus, celebrated with wedding songs and dances.

The passage from the ferry through the screaming, shoving swarms of room renters, who fight you for your suitcases and press your face into photographs of their rooms, is like something out of Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds.
The fortress town is superbly beautiful, with views of the sea that are almost shocking in their inexhaustibility and brilliant color. The town is laid out on the amoeba plan, with houses radiating from each other via communal walls, and forming a common defensive outer wall. It combines defensive necessity with religious sensibility, a maze of tunnel-like streets and low gates and sudden forks that lead into unknown passageways, and would either stymie an invader or confront a visitor with revelations, like the unexpected angel I am facing now, standing in a carved niche over a doorway I never meant to find. Here you find your way by being lost. Still, although the sun sets as dramatically as a great lover makes love, the streets resound with tapes of cheap beach holiday music and the restaurants offer the kind of “international” cooking that is quintessentially provincial. Kimon and Elpida have given me a letter to a friend of theirs who is the president of an inland village, and I am glad to be going tomorrow to look him up.

I set out early so that I can stop at villages on the way. It is easy to see, as I drive, why Naxos was Byron’s favorite of the Greek islands, with its confluences of romance. There is the romance of legend, the romance of aristocracy, the romance of desolation in the uneasy, agitated-looking brown mountains that climb and fall as sharply as a heart patient’s cardiogram, and the romance of fertility in the interior, all terraced vineyards, olive trees, fruit orchards, potato fields, houses swathed in bougainvillea and jasmine, like rich women in furs. Naxos is the largest Cycladic island, and there is something palatial about its scale, the way the terraced farmland makes a grand formal descent into the valleys, like the impressive staircase of a grand house. I stop to look at a Venetian lord’s tower, with a small stone chapel curled against it like a house cat. The little chapel has a dual identity: one aisle is consecrated for Greek Orthodox worship, the other for Roman Catholic.

The village of Apiranthos is a world of marble, even nicknamed
marmarino
, “made of marble”—it must have once been a wealthy village, as the elaborate marble plaques, carved with names and dates over many of the doorways, suggest. Now, though, the crusty proprietor of a museum grumbles that all the money goes to Naxos town. “Apiranthos doesn’t make any money during the season, and look around you, even with our views, we don’t have a hotel, only a few rooms to rent.” He strolls me down to the museum of village life, past a small penned flock of goats, two of them lying odalisque style on a wooden table. The house is ordered and charming as only uninhabited houses are. Even in this village house on Naxos, the new ideal of the photograph shapes the arrangements inside, just as our idea of the beauty of a face is now the camera’s ideal, the photogenic face. Our eyes are used to conceiving the perfect interior as one about to be photographed, nothing spilled, smudged, disarranged, scattered. This “village” house mirrors the ideal; even though its furnishings have been painstakingly collected, it cannot really look like a village house looked. The kitchen especially has an unearthly order, with its earthenware
pithoi
for olive oil and wine neatly displayed, and its stunningly clean paddles for sliding bread into the oven. In the bedroom, a
stefanothiki
, a carved wooden box holding the imaginary couple’s wedding crowns, hangs on the wall, and a colorful embroidered hammock is slung between posts of the parents’ bed, so the mother could tend to it and rock it without having to get up—without a baby the arrangement seems ingenious. But none of the babies I know would be cooperative enough to accept this neat packaging. The house poses the mirror problem again—when do we see what we are looking at?

“You must come again,” the museum proprietor says as I get into the car. “You can rent a room in my house. It is a museum.”

“A museum of what?” I ask. “A museum of me,” he answers.

I drive on, searching for the comfortably prosperous village of the man who is expecting me, whose name translates to Basil the Rifle, a name given to some ancestor, maybe because of good
marksmanship, or the lucky acquisition of an impressive gun, or simply because of a reputation for bad temper. It is a mark of the enormous power of public opinion and community relations, and the martial force of Greek gossip, that in Greece so many people carry surnames their neighbors gave them, distinguished permanently by a moment of local reputation. No wonder there is a prayer against the evil eye, and that one of the striking features of the prayers I read on the ferry was the tense mistrust and suspicion of other people—it is a companion tradition to the tradition of Greek hospitality.

The world of Naxos is of a different scale and color than bright, gemlike Thasos; Naxos is coppery, its vistas farther away from the viewer, as if you are there and not there at the same time. When I arrive at the village, Mr. Rifle, his three daughters, and their grandfather, all wearing high rubber boots, are making wine. Cascades of grapes are stacked against the wall. They have already trod the grapes, Mr. Rifle tells me, and now they are finishing the pressing by machine. He throws great shovelfuls of pressed grapes into the machine, while the three daughters, their eyes purple-black as grapes, ladle the juice from a well that catches the runoff into buckets. The oldest girl passes the buckets to their grandfather for barreling. “When you harvest grapes for wine,” Mr. Rifle says to me, “you are practicing a kind of agriculture in which time is as important an element as sun and soil. So I think it is not only practical, but a kind of
gouri
, a good luck talisman, to have three generations pressing the grapes together. How can my wine not be good to drink?” I sit on a stone wall and watch the family, this living votive image, making their wine, until Basil and Maria, his shy teenager, are ready to drive with me to the seaside village of Apollonas for lunch. In a field, a tiny newborn donkey looks like a toy animal, and we pass men riding sidesaddle on donkeys on the highway. Donkeys are still the most efficient way to reach farm plots cut out of sharp terraces, and rural Greece is crisscrossed with well-trafficked mule paths. When we reach Apollonas, we make the local pilgrimage to
the gigantic kouros who has been lying on his back overlooking the rich blue sea since the sixth century
B.C.
, when his maker seems to have judged him a failure and left him here. “Don’t you want to take a picture?” Basil asks me, and I hold out the notebook and pen I am carrying. “That’s your camera?” he says skeptically, and shrugs at my lost opportunity. But this is exactly the kind of tableau that makes me think that in Greece, the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is exactly reversed. The light and scenery seem to turn photographs into symbols, not even images, of a kind of general sublime; only words will make experience of being here specific—even glorious photographs seem to take on a curious embalmed quality here, where a word is worth a thousand pictures.

We settle at a table overlooking the sea at a taverna called the Little Dolphin and eat local sheep’s cheese, the proprietress’s chicken in tomato and cinnamon sauce, salad with tomatoes she takes me into her garden to pick, and wine from the barrel. Basil will not be happy until I abandon my knife and fork. He leans forward and says, “Do you know the saying?” I say I don’t know the saying. “Well,” he smiles, “the proverb says women and chicken both need to be picked up in the hands.” The proprietress is watching our glasses and brings us another carafe and more bread—I recognize this vigilance and custodial tenderness in her cooking, her well-tended garden, her well-tended clients. She looks to me to be one of those people who think their way into the world through a skill, who develop the personal excellence of a gift into a principle, a successful balance of herbs and meat leading to a carefully nurtured garden and animals, leading to nourishing people, leading to thoughts about conserving the fertility of the soil, and on to an awareness of the meaning of being a part of a community, all consequences maybe of experimenting with oregano and cinnamon. I wish we could do something less cold than paying her—give her a gift, something she wanted, not something she earned—but open admiration of her beautiful cooking and beautiful manners will have to serve. “We have always been famous on Naxos for our wine,”
Basil says, taking an appreciative sip. “You know wine was discovered here by Dionysus? There is a story about how it happened, that everyone hears at some point, at any rate, any one who grows up here, though of course we have large emigrant communities, like all the Aegean islands—our mothers and grandmothers, the women of the islands, were the domestic servants, the baby nurses and child caretakers and seamstresses and cooks of the wealthy families on the mainland and in Asia Minor and Egypt. They would work for a family for a set number of years with the agreement that the family would then provide them with
prika.
”

“Well, at least the
prika
part is over,” I say. Demanding and offering
prika
in exchange for marriage was made illegal in 1983, and if you look in a Greek glossy wedding magazine, under the cheerfully efficient checklist that in an American counterpart would be called something like “Wedding Do’s and Don’ts” (Do remember that the bride’s parents pay for the rehearsal dinner, etc.) you will find the admonition “Do remember that the dowry has been illegal since 1983.”

“
E
,” he says to me, using a sound that is as distinctively Greek and as untranslatable as “uh” or “uhm-hmm,” sounds you don’t hear on these shores, “the
prika
part is over like sheep stealing, which is also against the law, is over. And we have a patron saint of sheep stealing, Saint Mamas. We had a lot of practice under the Turks in appearing to obey laws. With us, men obey some laws and women obey men. Maybe
prika
will disappear, but right now it has only changed its shape. Now the ideal is a girl who has a civil service job, because they can’t be fired. Or a job with a multinational; prime real estate is always attractive. But there are changes, too. The boy now has to offer something; he should show he can earn a decent living, or have a good degree, or at least be a
kalo paidi
, a decent guy, whereas before, all he really had to do was have a pair of balls. You’ll see if you stay here that
prika
is still around. But it’s more fun to talk about Dionysus, who took Ariadne without
prika.
Do you want to hear the story?” I nod that I do.

“When Dionysus was still an adolescent, he set out on a journey towards Naxos. Since it was a long way away from where he was, he needed to break the monotony of the journey and sat down on a boulder to relax. From the boulder as he looked down at his feet, he saw a plant beginning to grow directly in front of him, and the shape of its leaves and stems was so beautiful that he decided to take the plant with him and transplant it when he reached Naxos. So he uprooted it and carried it along with him. But the sun was burning hot and he was afraid that the plant would wither before he reached the island. He stumbled on the bone of a bird in the road, and got the idea to put the plant inside the hollow of the bone to protect it from the sun. Then he went further on his way. But held in his divine hands, the plant continued to grow, and it flourished so quickly that it spilled out below and above the bird’s bone. So he had the same worry that the plant would wither and pondered what to do next. Then he happened upon the bone of a lion, broader of course than the bird’s bone, and he fit inside it the bird’s bone with the green plant. In a little while his divine force made the tendrils of the plant spill out of the lion’s bone. He caught sight of the bone of a donkey, even larger than the lion’s bone, and he sheltered the two other bones and the plant inside it. Holding the three bones with the plant growing as rapidly as a river rushes, he arrived in Naxos. When he was ready to put the plant into the good dark soil of our island, he observed that the roots of the plant were tightly bound around the bones, and he could not separate the plant from them without destroying its roots. So he replanted it, leaves, bones, and all, just as it was. In just a little time the plant took root and flourished and became a vine that put forth grapes. From these vines, the god made the first wine and gave it to the people to drink. And the miracle of the drink came from the way the god had brought it to Naxos. Because when people drink wine, at first they sing and rejoice like birds. And when they drink more, they become as strong as lions, and as ready to fight, and when they drink still more, they act exactly like asses.” Basil hits the table with his fist,
loving his punch line. I think it is funny too, but more because it seems comic to hear such a moralizing Christian story about that outstandingly amoral god, Dionysus. The god of frenzied inspiration is here used to convey the village equivalent of a message against drunk driving. The god’s gift of wine here is received with admonitory folk proverbs and wry skepticism, and he is admired as villagers would most admire him, for his magical fertility, divine agricultural powers.