Dinner with Persephone (33 page)

The big nineteenth-century cathedral, a monument to the tangled collaboration between the European powers and the Greeks which produced this state, was founded by King Otto and his Queen Amalia, neither of them Greek nor Orthodox. From 1863 to 1964 the German-Danish Glucksberg kings were crowned here, until the Greeks voted against further monarchy in 1973; and inside
lie the bones of Orthodox martyrs, the remains of the unofficial patron saint of the Greek revolution, Gregory the Fifth, a patriarch of Constantinople hanged by the Turks shortly after the outbreak of the rebellion, and the sixteenth-century martyr Filothei, whose bones are always carried in procession on February 19 by one of her descendants. Her stinging remarks about Athenians have made more than one modern-day Athenian speculate about who exactly it was that martyred her: “They cannot stand firm, these Athenians. They are … irresolute, faithless, shameless, abominable, desperate, their mouths always open in mockery and complaint, speaking a barbarous language, eager to blame, loving strife, cavilling, pusillanimous, gossiping, arrogant, lawless, guileful, snooping, eternally on the lookout for the disasters of others.”

I look at my watch, and sit down on a bench. Kostas is fifteen minutes late, but I am used to Greek timekeeping, which is utterly flexible in a way I find very pleasant: clocks seem to be perceived as representatives of a cosmic bureaucracy, which may nominally rule us but to which we will never submit. A man sits down on the bench next to me, ready for a chat. He tells me that he is originally from Chios, and about his navy days and how a saint named Agia Markella saved him from a coma after a shipboard accident that left him unconscious. He gave a lamp to her church in Chios to thank her, and tells me if there is anything I want, a child, for instance, I must pray to her to make me worthy of getting my wish, and to help me. He puts his hand on my knee, and I politely remove it, and tell him that I come from a place where the customs are more austere than in Crete. He says he is surprised, that he didn’t know such places existed in America, and asks me one of those ingenious
kamaki
questions to which there is no safe reply. “Have you ever been with a Greek man?” I run through my menu of options. “Yes” will mean to him there is no reason to turn him down. “No” will mean you don’t know what you’re missing, let me show you. I briefly consider “I don’t remember,” but consider national
filotimo
; this would possibly be grounds for deportation. I settle on “Why do you ask?” and he
tells me that in all the ports, the ladies of the harbor request Greeks. “The Americans get drunk, they are only good for a short time, but with the Greeks, my girl, eight times a night is what you can expect. I remember a time in Tokyo when I went back and forth between two girls all night, and satisfied them both, like a rooster does with the hens. Eight times a night! Do you want to go somewhere with me and find out?” Luckily, Kostas arrives, and we set off to the museum. “I’ll think of you,” the old sailor calls, waving goodbye to me.

On the way to the National Historical Museum in the old parliament building, we walk past the statue of the revolutionary leader Kolokotronis, whose raised arm, Kostas says, points to Constantinople. I was very curious to see the Zographos paintings, since they crystallize another split between Greece as East and West. Originally, General Makriyiannis had commissioned a European painter to paint scenes from the revolution as he described them, but the French painter’s work could not translate the images as he wanted them to exist, and Makriyiannis fired him and hired a Greek instead. At many of the little souvenir postcard stands, you can find a reproduction of a popular folk picture that represents General Makriyiannis decisively showing the European painter, who slinks off, in his un-Greek frock coat and top hat, the way back to Europe. I saw some of the drama in the division between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek paintings in an earlier visit to the National Gallery’s collection. The nineteenth-century Greek painters seem to have been mostly schooled in Munich, the city that strongly influenced modern Athens, because of its Bavarian king and courtiers. Despite the academic realism of the paintings’ style, though, the subjects are often unintelligible. It is unnerving to look at paintings so conventional in style and so unreadable in subject: an old woman who incomprehensibly kneels on a mountain is making a
tama
, a religious vow; a peasant girl, with furtive misery, watches another woman dandling a baby—this turns out to be a scene of natural and adoptive mothers; some men dressed as fanciful monstrous animals burst into
a dining room, a scene as it turns out from carnival; an old man in a turban is about to lead a small child away from its mother, who is kissing the child on the forehead—this is a scene of the
paidomazoma
, the Ottoman Turkish practice of culling non-Turkish boys for the Janissary regiment, while girl children were chosen for harems. And a scene of festively dressed beaming adults and tiny children in a cottage room, which turns out to be not only a picture of everyday domestic enjoyment, but the children’s engagement party. Even your eyes couldn’t tell you what was happening in the pictures—it was like seeing Chinese genre scenes done in Western style. The twentieth-century pictures by and large evaded realism, and many had returned to the Byzantine rejection of perspective.

Marble busts of Greek patriots and self-consciously grim portraits of Independence warriors, cases of axes and rifles and fatally curved swords, make this seem a museum of rage. One room displays a case of Kolokotronis’s belongings, the famous plumed helmet marked with a cross, and weapons. A guard comes up to us, and asks Kostas, “She’s French?” “No,” he says, “American.” “I thought American girls only wore trousers,” says the guard, “but she’s wearing a skirt.” “They wear what they like,” says Kostas. “And why do you bring her here?” “She wants to learn about Greek history,” he says, and the guard takes my arm. “What, she wants to learn about Aliki?” he says, referring to a Kewpie-doll-like blond actress of uncertain age, who is always referred to as “our national star,” and whose comedies are the bread-and-butter films of Greek TV. Kostas says, “She knows all about Aliki, she’s seen
Holiday in Aegina
and
Aliki in the Navy
, and I read her the critic who said that there were two timeless phenomena in Greece, Aliki and stupidity.”

“Then let me show her a picture of Athens in Otto’s time,” the guard replies, and we go into another room. “Look how poor Athens was, like a village.” “But beautiful,” I say, and the guard looks at me with irony and regret, and Kostas says, “Yes, sometimes we seem crucified between hopeless poverty and hopeless prosperity.” “Now she must see the American doctor,” the guard says, and conducts
us to a painting of a foustanella-wearing Samuel Howe, the husband of Julia Ward Howe. The guard begins to tell the story of Howe’s service here during the Greek War of Independence, but some of his lower teeth loosen during the telling. He spits them into his hand, and calmly replaces them; “I can’t finish the story without my teeth,” he says, his fever to tell his story so great that he treats the teeth simply as instruments in its service.

Kostas has to be in Brussels later this evening for EEC work, so we pass hurriedly through a gallery of traditional women’s costumes, and a room full of intriguing patriotic posters from the Second World War, one of which shows the Virgin Mary hovering in a cloud above a battle, next to a newspaper which has a headline about the Panagia’s presence, declaring in smaller print that this was no fantastic story or legend.

The Zographos paintings are a kind of history of the birth of the new Greek state, from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to a painting that had to be destroyed, showing a Bavarian minister tearing the heart from Greece’s body with a bloody hand. There is a picture of Greece crowning the Philhellenes—Europeans and Americans who fought alongside the Greeks—and one of God addressing Greece, telling the country, “I shall set you up to be ruled over by Othon and Amalia.” God floats on a cloud, wearing a white beard. On one side of the picture, the European powers, wearing European military uniforms, decorations, and nineteenth-century ballgowns, accompanied by foustanella-wearing Greek soldiers, observe as an angel drops laurel wreaths onto the heads of Otto and Amalia. Makriyiannis commissioned twenty-five paintings, and described in detail the battle scenes for the painter, who was himself a veteran from Sparta, taking him to the sites of some of the battles. With their sense of the human figure as symbolic, their sense that time is continuous, that time is the perspective, rather than space, so that scenes occurring at different times occur on the same plane, these paintings are profoundly different from what the French painter must have shown Makriyiannis. This
painter’s idea of what an image was was formed on different models, Byzantine icons obviously, but also eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Greek and Turkish embroidery; cloth forces just this magical floating sense of space and these doll-like human figures—and I am stunned, finally, by their resemblance to Turkish Ottoman miniatures.

“How could we not be part of each other’s art?” asks Kostas. “We are part of each other’s music, each other’s languages, each other’s traditions. Like you blacks and whites in the South, we may be hostile to each other, but we are fused; we each are the unconscious of the other. And at the time of Makriyiannis, not so very long ago, the people we fought were much closer to us in our customs and way of life than our allies. Makriyiannis was a man for whom images were full of symbolic meaning, and I doubt the French painter understood this. The general tells a story about another set of decorations he commissioned after Zographos had finished his pictures. He set aside part of his garden to be laid out in mosaics of black and white pebbles taken from the seashore,
krokalia
, we call it. He had the mosaicist lay out a circle with spears around it, to symbolize Greece surrounded for centuries by tyrants. Below the circle there was a dog, who was the Greek faithful to his country as to a religion, and the columns of the temple of Olympian Zeus and Hadrian’s gate and an owl, to represent the classical past. Then he had the mosaicist show two men dancing, one a man in Greek clothes, one in European clothes, which Makriyiannis called ‘Frankish costume.’ The two men were struggling to dance in the style of their own native dances, and Makriyiannis wrote that this represented how Europe and Greece would come into conflict, ‘for no man can learn another’s steps.’ ”

I stop at one of the downtown kiosks for a newspaper—an attempt was made on the life of an environmental official who had gone to the police with evidence that portions of the local forest were being destroyed by organized real estate speculators. Some fifteen shots were fired into his house, and a family member commented
that in Greece people were murdered for earth more often than for narcotics. A married housebuilder has killed his sister-in-law and himself in what seems to have been a crime of passion, in the family’s apartment building, where both his and her relatives lived, including her own mother and brother. This typical Greek domestic arrangement is often praised as a demonstration of the exemplary value of keeping families together, but it can also, as I have seen, enclose a family in a kind of insidious theater instead of a house, magnifying and concentrating passions and incompatibilities so sharply that the only denouement possible is one of violence, since the possessiveness of disturbed families is motivated by needs for power and punishment more often than love or mutual concern.

The cover of a lavish weekly television guide shows a popular and witty satirist named Harry Klinn dressed in a strapless orange gown for a carnival special, which reminds me that I am going to a carnival party myself tonight, and the sight of turbaned golden faces covered with glitter and jewelry hanging from wires in a window tempts me inside the store to see if there is anything I can do about a costume, or at least a mask. The season’s shows featuring music and political satire, and the displays of costumes themselves, reflect the tradition of carnival in Greece as an outlet for free speech and uncensored social commentary, under the protection of a mask and costume. A London
Times
correspondent circa 1875 remarked that he had seen a local Athenian humorist “reeling drunk” during carnival, “who had put on the classic helmet of the princely Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, making a little fun of Dr. Schliemann’s recent discoveries there.” He also noticed the other distinctive preoccupation of carnival here, transvestism—not just a sexual transvestism, but a social one, a chance to reveal temporarily what is hidden in you. The reporter remarked that “a tendency to appear in the costumes of foreign countries is strongly manifested … the Turk, and at times, his wife, seems to be a favorite character”—still true, I think, looking around at the many mannequins wearing belly dancer costumes and jeweled mouth veils, or fezes and toy curved scimitars. There are
costumes in which to metamorphose from European to African, with heavily muscled dark-skinned rubber chests and spears, from adult to baby wearing a goblet-sized pacifier and lace cap, from local working person into European leader, through rubber masks of Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, and a supply, stamped “Made in Germany,” of Hitler. But the most popular transformations, judging by the variations available, are from male to female. There is practically a whole floor upstairs of enormous portable breasts, some white, some black, some celebrity. Some come with toy babies to suckle. A face and full-breasted torso of Madonna is offered, and there is a range of malleable rubber strap-on pregnant bellies.

Later that night at the party, the room is crammed with whiskey-sipping men, smoking relentlessly, in the Greek style, many in various stages of pregnancy. It is interesting to see that there are few Greek-flavored costumes here—no Olympian gods, no Byzantine empresses, no village dress heavy with embroidery and the portable dowries of jewelry, no one from the Karaghiozis shadow puppet repertoire, except Alexander the Great. The host and hostess, a theater couple, are dressed as Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara. They pour me a glass of wine, and introduce me to other guests in various clusters of conversation, lastly a man who says his name is Stamatis, a name that with its relation to the Greek verb “to stop” was often used as a kind of magical talisman to stop a run of bad luck or deaths in a family, or in one case I know, as a form of magical birth control, since the wife didn’t want more children. Stamatis is dressed as Violetta in
La Traviata
; his cleavage is deeper than mine, and his makeup much better applied. Our hostess tells him I am working on a book, and he says he will be happy to talk to me as long as I don’t identify him. We agree that I will call him the magically protective name Stamatis. I compliment him on his costume, saying that La Dame aux Caméllias seems to be a kind of traditional transvestite costume here, mentioning that I have seen a famous photograph of the great Greek painter Tsarouchis as Violetta. Tsarouchis, a flamboyant homosexual whose epigrams are so
famous here that they are simply called “Tsarouchia,” wrote that he had made his Violetta costume out of traditionally masculine materials, using the white undershirt worn ubiquitously by Greek men, and his grandfather’s foustanella. “Of course,” says Stamatis, “you will surely have noticed by now that we are a completely transvestite culture, it is our one real continuity, in history, in sex, in politics, in religion. For us, the supreme ideal of emotion is a transvestite ideal, the moment when reality and fantasy fuse and become the same thing, the moment that gives the sensation of simultaneity, as in Holy Communion. If you hear our great Lenten hymn to the Virgin Mary, you will hear her praised as the one who resolves all contradictions. Our political aspirations, too, are transvestite: our great modern political experiences, like the Megali Idea, or the defeat of the Italian attack in 1941, or now, with Macedonia, are supreme because we feel ourselves transformed into our own legends, legends that correct what actually occurred; we wear the drag of Byzantines reconquering Constantinople, ancient Hellenes staving off the Romans, transvestites of time. This is why myth, the transvestite form of fiction, is our ideal literary genre. Myth is not, as earnest European scholars have earnestly written, an attempt to explain reality; it is an attempt to recreate it, so that story and life are the same thing, so that there is for a time no painful difference between imagination and reality. That moment of fusion, central to all religious ritual, is for us what gives the sensation, even the illusion, of immortality, which we struggle to reproduce again and again.