Dinner with Persephone (31 page)

T
he bell rings at 8:15 in the morning on New Year’s Eve, and when I open the door, a group of children shout, “Can we tell them?” the traditional introduction to the New Year’s carols, the
kalanda
, whose name comes from the Roman Calends, the feast of the first of the month, even more powerful when Julius Caesar’s solar calendar made January 1 the beginning of the year as well as the month. The children make a glorious din, one holding a wooden ship with a burning candle projecting from it like a mast. They beat their triangles, and sing: “Saint Basil is coming from Caesarea, holding an icon and paper, paper and pen … the pen wrote a fate and the paper spoke it …” This is a delicately melancholy song you hear in many variants at this time of year, a song that has something in it of the weariness of traveling for long distances on foot, and some of the sweetness and expectation of meeting that is part of walking far. It is in the melody itself, which has, with its particular turns and sudden vocal vistas, a feeling both of physical effort and of sudden perspective, a glimpse of the sea. I give the children coins and candy that are the traditional reward for the songs, and hear them beginning the cycle down the hall, before I have shut the door.

Saint Basil is a patron saint of education, but the pen he carries that writes fates makes him a double-edged figure appropriate to this month, which was named in honor of the two-faced Roman god Janus, god of endings and beginnings, of peace and of war. Basil comes bearing the fortunes of the year, a figure poised, too, between worlds and different ways of perceiving fate—in the antique world, fate was something spun out of threads held by three frightening women, but by the time of this carol, set in the world of the intricate holy bureaucracy created by bishop-administrators, it had become what is written. The two conceptions coexist in the language’s words for fate,
mira
, the name for the women who wove destinies, and
to grafto
, the written, what is recorded for each person. Saint Basil’s feast, New Year’s, is here a feast of luck: everywhere you walk the shop windows are full of good luck charms, gold coins marked with the year to bake into your Saint Basil’s bread, the sweet cakey bread served on New Year’s Day; medallions with raised reliefs of ships, for the voyage of a new year, or with houses, or keys, which Janus often held in Roman statues, entwined with evil-eye charms; coins that this year carry the portrait of Alexander the Great, for luck with Macedonia—the world around you becomes a double of itself, multiplied into votive talismans, the planet itself seems hung in the heavens as an offering to secure a better world than itself. My United States preconception of this holiday is erotic, images of men in black tie and women in glittering dresses, champagne, dancing all night into the dawn of the new year, love songs punctuated occasionally by noisemakers that make the sound of a baby wailing, a holiday of couples, in a way, conceiving the new year. When people complain, as they often do, that New Year’s was a disappointment, or as you hear occasionally, that New Year’s is always a disappointment, the tone is one of erotic disillusionment. Here, as I make my way in a taxi to the airport to pick up Kostas, there is a sense of the transition from one year to another as a moment of pure risk—the neighborhood shop windows tremble with good luck charms, precarious existence dangles from glittering
chains and brilliant scarlet ribbons. Along with the medallions and coins are displays of cards, dice games, small roulette wheels, and toy slot machines—everyone is supposed to participate in a ritual gamble on New Year’s, as a way of inviting luck to come into their lives, and card playing was mentioned as a central feature of the three New Year’s parties I was asked to.

We drive past a damaged tax office on the way to one of them—the government is promising tax crackdowns in the new year, since a recent study estimated that the combined income from Greece’s black market and envelopes-under-the-table economy and widely practiced tax evasion equals some thirty-one percent of the country’s gross domestic product. In the past few weeks, four city tax offices have been bombed, partly, I suppose, to destroy records as well as to help subvert the stricter policy the government wants to put in place. “It will be difficult to enforce tax collection,” Kostas says. “We have a well-rooted double economy, in which people are used to being paid twice, once the official taxable salary, and again in the envelope under the table. We even have a patron saint of tax evasion, you know.”

“Who is that?” I ask. “Saint Mamas. The patron saint of sheep-stealers, and of the Greek criminal world, who are said to invoke him before bank robberies, which as you know are nearly everyday occurrences here.” It’s true that there seems to have been a rash of bank robberies during my stay here, the most recent involving a bank that found a hole in its vault and discovered that over three hundred safe deposit boxes had been broken into.

We wind up at Aura’s, carrying a
vasilopitta
made by Kostas’s mother, whose Asia Minor roots are a special gastronomic credential in the making of this cake-bread supposed to have originated in the saint’s Caesarea. Already hanging at the front door is a large onion wrapped in silver foil, for this year’s luck, since an onion, even if it is uprooted, continues to put out shoots, and is thought of as an immortal plant, I remember from the stories about Alexander the Great. The room is thick with cigarette smoke and the noise of
card shuffling and rattling dice, players priming their luck, “for the good of the year.” An aunt of Aura’s is telling fortunes with coffee cups, and the technique makes me wonder about the ethnic origins of Rorschach, since the reader sees a picture in the shape the grounds make at the bottom of the cup, and the interpretation tells the meaning of the picture. The room quiets for Aura to cut the
vasilopitta
—another dream image in my modern
oneirokrites
, which agree that it is good luck to get the coin in your dream, as long as the dream takes place during the season of the feast. I would be helpless to have this dream, and wonder if that means I couldn’t have this particular kind of luck. But we don’t have the custom, so we don’t have the dream. I wonder, too, if that means my fortune cannot be told here. The world of external experience is one of the wellsprings of the unconscious, and maybe the images of the coffee cup will be too local to map the delicate intersections between the alien icons of my experience, and my imagination, the capacity to have new experience, there where people’s fortunes begin to take form.

The first slices of the
vasilopitta
are dedicated in different ways by the person sharing them out—Aura cuts one for the poor, one for the house, one for the theater, one for Amnesty International. “No one really knows where this custom comes from, as far as I can make out,” she says. “And of course it has a set of separate mythical origins—it may have been associated with the worship of the sun god, a sun-shaped cake made for a festival to coax the sun to return light and warmth to the world. December 25 was, after all, the feast of the Persian Mithras, the god of light, whose holiday was adopted by the Romans as the Feast of Invincible Light. This is how the Persian magi get incorporated into the Christian myth, it works the same way as the Zeus and Europa story—the Greek god Zeus takes Asia in the form of the Asian princess Europa, and breeds with her; both plots have figures who represent the concealed origins of the myth.

“The Christian myth I know about
vasilopitta
is that the citizens of Caesarea, which is now, of course, Kayseri, in Turkey, were mercilessly
overtaxed by the Byzantine emperor’s representatives, so they went to Basil, their bishop, to argue the case on their behalf. Basil asked them to bring him jewelry and treasure in case he had to offer the government officials bribes. But he was successful and they refused the treasures in the end. When he tried to return the jewelry to the lenders, however, many dubious claims were made, and so he had pies baked and put precious objects in each one. And by a miracle, each family received the pie that held its own particular treasure. But the Christians had to work hard to appropriate this season for themselves. The church fathers did their best to destroy the Roman January festivals—a first-century bishop was martyred for trying to suppress the festivals, which shows how popular they were, and John Chrysostom, one of the three hierarchs of Orthodoxy, and a singularly nasty man, preached viciously against the celebration of Calends, in the fourth century. There used to be transvestite masquerades, and street drama, especially interesting to me, of course. And church canons were made against the celebrations, quite late—it was a struggle that went on into the tenth century. You see, we are told that the Romans and Greeks spontaneously embraced Christianity, but only some did. The fact is that the state imposed this religion on its citizens—Theodosius, after all, declared officially that anyone who refused Christianity was to be considered insane—and Byzantium was full of conversos, people forced to declare a public faith they didn’t share, or were simply indifferent to, like the Jews in the period before the Spanish Inquisition.

“ ‘No man,’ ” she recited, “ ‘is to put on feminine dress, nor any woman, the dress proper to men, nor yet are masks, whether comic, satyric, or tragic, to be worn’—for this, the good fathers would excommunicate you, that is to say destroy you socially and economically, since no one would do business with you as an excommunicate or marry the children you needed to settle. Later, the masquerades were clearly used as veiled protests against the church, with mock church ceremonies and people dressed as
monks carrying huge wooden penises, which helps explain the church’s frenzy over the festivities. Someone has told you, I’m sure, about the
kalikantzari
, the hairy demons who especially emerge at this time of year, and are only driven away on January 6? Well, it seems clear to me that they are part of the Christian program to demonize the people who stubbornly celebrated their traditional January festivals, parading in goatskins or other animal costumes.”

I think to myself that some of this hostility to the state-sponsored religion may have crept into the portraits of the saints, some of whom behave very much like household demons—like Saint Spyridion, who if you don’t celebrate his holiday will give you acne. He will also spoil sewing and weaving, as a legendary lady who wanted to finish her weaving found out. “Little Saint Spyridion doesn’t need a holiday,” she said, finished her task, and went to bed. There she dreamed of an angry monk, who said to her, “Since I am so little, you will see how many little holes I can make,” and when she woke up, she found her work motheaten. And there is my own favorite holy mischief-maker, Saint Andrew the Frying Pan Piercer, who will make holes in your frying pan if you don’t make him pancakes in it on his day.

After the cake is cut, the guests return to their pursuits of their fortunes, playing their preferred games of chance, or hearing their fortunes, while one of the myriad holiday music programs plays on television. Linked-arm dancing breaks out in one corner and winds its way from room to room when a favorite song in the sexy melancholy voice of the singer Mitropanos is overheard: “I love you like sin, I hate you like prison …” I brave the coffee-cup reading, which is meaninglessly general. To compare, I draw tarot cards, for a woman with a muse’s name to read. They envision something so specific, and so ridiculous, that I dismiss it, so by the time it happens the following September, I have completely forgotten about the prediction.

As a treat for New Year’s, Kostas rented a famous 1954 Melina Mercouri film called
Stella
, which he tells me was the role that first
made her famous, and is a crucial piece of Greek pop culture, which is after all, he tells me, “the modern expression of folklore. Anyway,” he says, “you cannot proceed without seeing this film. It captures a modern Greek view of erotic love that is still alive. It is very melodramatic, but then the Greek idea of erotic love is a melodramatic one.” He grins. “It will help you understand why we have one of the two lowest birthrates in Europe.” I am also curious because Melina has been much in evidence this season, trailing a Belgian film crew behind her on her many progresses through Athens, declaring to them that as to Macedonia, “our name is our soul.”

Stella, played by Mercouri, is a singer at the Paradise Taverna, who sings “all the songs of life and love and death.” She chooses her lovers instead of being chosen by them, and deals with them honestly; her idea of a contract between lovers would have a respect for the other’s freedom as its first principle. She wears low-cut dresses that outline her body neither indifferently nor to provoke: the way she handles them reminds me of the costumes of women skaters—she has an athlete’s sense of her beauty, that her sensuality and fine body are an accomplishment, they reflect her skill in being alive, not enticement; they are a sign of self-respect, not cunning or need. She is ending an affair with a younger man, who is well-mannered and gentlemanly with her but is essentially using her to escape his suffocating family, whose idea of middle-class correctness conceals brutalities that are completely foreign to Stella, and who are horrified that she loves and respects her work dancing and singing with the “repulsive bouzoukia.” She then meets a soccer player named Miltos, who courts her by threatening to drive his car over her, when she initially refuses to go out with him, tearing through the entrance of the Paradise Taverna. He tells her that when he likes a woman, it’s “like going into a cage with wild beasts,” and lights a stick of dynamite, threatening to throw it at her instead of roses. He presents himself as her erotic equal, someone who defies conventional social or sexual constraints, but he sees erotic life as violent, a struggle to the death, in which victory, the man’s fulfillment,
means that the woman submits utterly to the man’s will, or has to die. He cannot tolerate the sense of her as separate from him, and must either force her to fuse with him, so that they seem to be a being with one will, or destroy her. He tells her that he has decided they will marry, and that if she refuses to do what he wants, he’ll leave her, he swears on his mother’s life. Stella wants him so much that she goes against her misgivings and consents, and he tells her the church and the day he has chosen. Love, she sings at the taverna, in a song you still hear often on the radio or at concerts, is a switchblade, with a double blade of joy and pain.