Dinner with Persephone (34 page)

“Our transvestism is cut into every facet of Hellenism, some of it quite literally. Here, in Athens, a city where Ramadan as well as Easter was celebrated for hundreds of years, we changed our clothes after the War of Independence, starting when carriages were introduced in our new European city Athens. The drivers changed their fezes and foustanellas, garments shared with Albanians and Turks, for top hats and European coats. In our parliament, some members held out for their fezes, but even the members who
put on the black frock coats accompanied the debates with the music of the clicking beads of the
komboloi
they had taken up from the Turks.” I remembered my actress friend, Aura, telling me that her mentors of a generation ago told her that one of the great challenges they faced onstage was in not being distracted by the audience’s clicking beads, even at Epidaurus, the classical theater that is to Greek tragedy what Stratford is to Shakespeare.

“To the East,” Stamatis says, fanning himself with Violetta’s lace-and-mother-of-pearl fan, “we dress as the West, to the West, we dress as the East, and I expect the Turks do a version of the same play. Where else but here would people insist so bitterly that any deviation from the Greek point of view is a betrayal of Western culture, and at the same time claim that the war in Yugoslavia was stirred up by ‘Western’ warmongers? For the West, we dress as classical Greeks, for the East and the Slav Balkans as their Byzantine Christian superiors. We dress our cultural villains
en travesti
; it is always the Turks who shattered our culture. And yet the great model for the Ottoman Empire was the empire of the Byzantines. I don’t excuse the Turks, their rule was full of poor administration and barbaric abuses, but I don’t glorify the Byzantines, whose rule was also full of barbaric abuses and poor administration, and who were far less tolerant of any deviation from their state religion than the Ottomans. The Byzantines tried to crush classical culture, although they ended up, as destroyers often do, like the Nazis who wanted to obliterate European Judaism, preserving it in maimed form, or like the Jews, so obsessed with obliterating what they perceived to be idols that they ended up idolizing themselves.

“Even our gods are transvestites, thanks to the willful Byzantine destruction of the religious pluralism the polytheists embraced. And gods that are forced underground will resurface in the strangest places, as Athena, Aphrodite, and Demeter, and Tyche, and many others do in Mary, an utterly pagan goddess, and in Christ himself, whom the Greek councils designed in their creed as a three-personed god, in a common Hellenic pattern, like Hecate and
others, and with a dual nature, like Aphrodite, who as Ourania presided over marital generative sex, and as Pandemos presided over erotic sex and prostitution. Even the divinizing of individual mortals is a Greek pattern of worship—the sky is full of our divine mortals, as over our heads in churches hovers Jesus the human Jew whom we made Christ, the Greek god, the thirteenth Olympian. I tell you, transvestism never ends here. Do you watch Lazopoulos?”

I do, although the Greek is difficult for me, and his political humor beyond me, full of inside jokes, rapid and idiomatic. Still, I am sure that Lakis Lazopoulos, although he may never be well-known outside of Greece, is a comedic genius on the order of Chaplin. He appears on television in a show made up of a cast of ten characters, all of whom he plays. The most famous of them is the widow Mitsi, the archetypal Mediterranean mother, whose destructive “nurturing love” is itself a form of transvestism, who disguises her malice, moral narcissism, and domineering drive to power by ascribing all her actions to maternal concern and tenderness, drawing all her distinction and prestige from a motherhood that is ultimately imaginary, a kind of mutual enslavement which it is sacrilege to confront. She is like the kind of Jew or Muslim who deflect any legitimate critical look at their cultures as being anti-Semitic or anti-Islam, insisting that any critical observation or dissent is a form of attack.

Dressed as the widow Mitsi, Lazopoulos turns himself into a busty middle-class matron, her helmeted coiffure a symbol of convention itself, her enormous bosom an aggressive weapon, her anguished made-up eyes gleaming piteously and ferociously behind unfashionable glasses, her lipsticked Cupid’s-bow mouth pursed, signaling flirtation, self-righteousness, calculated, coercive, theatrical misery, and real misery. Like many great comic creations, she is utterly humorless. The widow Mitsi is so famous that Lazopoulos has even been interviewed by a newspaper not in his own person, but in hers. Lazopoulos has also done brilliant theater sketches, one of a mother who invades every aspect of her son’s life, his career,
his orgasms, even his wife’s womb, announcing at every conflict that she will die if her wishes are not followed, finally driving her son to suicide. It is a brilliant comic feat, this piece, made out of material that is purely, oppressively tragic.

“And our greatest modern novelist, Taktsis, who was murdered only a few years ago, was a transvestite—I’m sure you’ve read
The Third Wedding Wreath.
”

I had read his remarkable novel, narrated by its women characters, which for many Greek readers is the consummate picture of post—civil war Greece, but I had not known how he was killed.

“He was found naked in his bed, strangled, on a summer day in 1988. Most nights, his neighbors said, he would get in his car and drive to places that were gathering places for sexual buyers and sellers, and Taktsis would look over the possibilities. Witnesses said Taktsis had gone out three times that night, dressed in women’s clothes and wearing a blond wig. He came back three times, each with a different man. The third man killed him. He was described as well-dressed, of average height, and wearing a mustache. You can always rely on your neighbors in Greece to know what your lovers look like and when they visit you. I can guarantee you that yours do too. The police found the house torn apart, with a camera and a video missing, who knows why? In their reconstruction of the murder, they concluded the attack must have come as a surprise, since there were no signs of previous violence, and the police coroner said the killer strangled Taktsis with his right hand. Isn’t it strange that they can know the details of a murder down to the murderer’s hand, but never find the killer himself? In this small country, in the narrower circles of male prostitutes, no information was ever turned up. Strange, isn’t it?”

Stamatis catches sight of a sloe-eyed man with thick dark hair, full lips, and the ideal body more often cultivated here by homosexuals. This ideal seems yet another variety of transvistism, since the mortal anatomy is supposed to cross-dress as marble, looking as much like a classical Greek statue as possible, and displaying the
classical profile. “
Ah, fors’ è lui
,” Stamatis says, in Violetta’s Italian, and I can see he is impatient to move on. He gives me a card from an ornate period card case he is carrying, and tells me to call him if I feel like it, when I am in Athens between trips.

When I get home, all the talk about the widow Mitsi makes me curious to look up the category of mothers in my dream books.
Yiayias
are in my modern dream books, a much idealized dream, in which you are advised to attend to her every word. But only one catalogues dreams of mothers, dreams in which the mother’s mood or physical health determines the outcome—if she is as she is in everyday life, it is good luck; if she is dead or sick, you will suffer grief, or be humiliated in some way. I turn to Artemidorus on mothers, where the dreams are stunningly different: “the case of one’s mother,” he writes, “is both complex and manifold.” The dreams are interpreted on the basis of the particular sexual positions the mother assumes during sex with the dreamer. In Artemidorus’s world, men dominate the world of dreams as they do the world of waking—each of these particular dreams presents the world as dreamed by a man. Artemidorus discusses first face-to-face intercourse between a dreamer and a living mother, delaying the interpretation of the same position practiced with a dead mother. This dream is bad for someone with a living father, but good for craftsmen, laborers, since a trade is like a mother, and demagogues and public figures, since a mother is a symbol of one’s country, and “just as a man who follows the precepts of Aphrodite when he makes love completely governs the body of his obedient and willing partner, the dreamer will control all the affairs of the city.” The view of lovemaking as a form of successful political domination of a submissive partner, and as a form of humiliation, is fascinating; dreaming of many different positions with a mother foreshadows bad outcomes, “for it is not right to insult one’s mother.” And so is the hierarchy of meanings assigned to the positions themselves, which, except for “missionary position” sex, are all the result of “wantonness, licentiousness, and intoxication …,” the worst of all being the mother
performing fellatio on her son. As for the Christian dream books, there is not one scene of explicit sex in any of them; sex is entirely represented through a veil of symbols, like caves and columns, never through felt experience, its existence charging the world with hidden meanings, codes recognizable to initiates, but carefully hidden away, as if for protection from someone.

I
nstead of flying kites and picnicking on Philopappos Hill, near the Acropolis, while the president of Greece strolls among the crowds, as is traditional for Athenians on Kathari Deftera, Clean Monday, the first day of Lent, I am going for the weekend to Hydra, which a friend has told me is the Greenwich Village of Greece, “bohemian, arty, full of discos and shipping families and vegetarian restaurants. But not Greece.” Still, I want to see this island, which has been repeatedly painted by modern Greek painters with much the same kind of erotic attention French impressionists felt for Provence. And besides, no matter where I have traveled in Greece, I have invariably been told that it either is not or is no longer Greece, as if there is an imaginary Greece that exists in perfect intact detail somewhere, much realer than the Greece we live in.

The island, largely settled by Christian Albanians, is almost pure rock, its cliffs ruddy and nicked like the faces of men who spend their days working outdoors and impatiently cut themselves when they shave. The town itself looks like a stage set, the red-tiled houses artfully positioned in negotiation with the cliffs, so that the town is forced to have a visible foreground and clear recession into the
distance, with a stage apron formed by the curving harbor; it is easy to see why painters love this island, with the radiant geometry of the houses, and the climactic harbor. I stroll through the many-leveled town, admiring blue iron railings wrought in the shape of enlaced anchors. The houses differ in details, with handsome, even playful entrances, brilliantly colored doors, brass door knockers in the shapes of women’s hands, some wearing rings and bracelets; but the buildings themselves are mostly variations on a theme, like domestic icons built to satisfy the strictures of some domestic theology. The steepness and rockiness of the setting they must be built in gives an intensity to the close gathering of the houses, helpless emblems of the compulsory intertwining of this community.

A model in a striped summer dress and white flats leans against a railing on the harbor on this chilly day, while a photographer holds up a white hoop to test the light on her face. A makeup artist wearing a blond braid strokes her cheeks with blusher, while Greek boys settle like pigeons on steps to look at her. The makeup artist brushes the model’s hair as if she were a doll, and the model moves her head slowly from side to side, experimenting with smiles of different intensity. The photographer tells her to unbutton her skirt to show more leg, while more local boys and a man in a ship captain’s hat flock to the steps, smoking furiously and cupping their chins in their hands, attentive as ideal schoolboys, their legs splayed hopefully. The makeup artist strikes up a conversation with me, telling me about the Athens hotel she was booked in, a place she says where men wearing toupees rent rooms by the hour, and other men who hung out by the clerk’s desk offered her jobs teaching English, and pressured her to let them take her picture, a well-known
kamaki
trophy, the album full of alleged conquests to be shown to buddies, the snapshots often more important than sex. She went for a coffee with one, she says, who told her he was a university professor, and confided to her that he chose sexual partners from a pool of his female students. “I don’t pressure them,” he told her, “it is their choice. Of course if they imagine it will help their grades, that is a
motive. But I say nothing.” When he made his offer to the makeup artist, she refused him, but he warned her, “You should choose a man soon, soon you will lose your beauty. I might marry you now, but in two years, I don’t think I would.”

The dawn comes into Greece with the quality of lightning, suddenly there is absolute, unavoidable light. Roosters crow, a donkey sounds its anguished wheeze. I have been invited to a pretty seaside village for Kathari Deftera lunch, a meal which marks the beginning of meatless Lent and consists of fish salads like taramosalata, a special kind of flat bread studded with sesame baked only once a year on this day, and the rivers of wine, which anesthetize the fast. I set out to walk to the village, ascending above the mansions with lemon trees in their marble courtyards, climbing the steeply cut stone staircases, marked with a variety of animal droppings, donkey, cat, dog, and bird, behind Hydra town, which lead to the hill villages. Some women and children are setting a table on a flat roof looking out from the cliffs, feeling spring beginning. I walk through brilliant green terraces of farm and pasture land following a dirt lane; a donkey passes by with a man riding sidesaddle, his wife walking behind him, exactly like a nineteenth-century genre painting I remember from the national gallery. To the right there is a dreamily beautiful farm, in a green valley overlooking the blue Aegean, which is set behind an elaborate door and gate, as if the entrance led directly into a mansion instead of a tree-lined country lane; and to the left there are flocks of sheep grazing among starry clusters of periwinkle-colored flowers and endless oceans of clover, their bells sounding exactly like church bells, which gives a new concreteness to the Orthodox prelates’ reference to their congregation as flocks—the very local world of Mediterranean pastoral metamorphosed into Christian symbolism, the divine, like our dreams, made up of images we see around us day by day, images that change worship from place to place as dreams change reality. The path drops down to the fishing village just above the shore, past a stone bridge in the shape of a ruined rainbow. Men in sweaters are working on boats,
painting and planing, sipping frappes, cold foamy coffee in glasses. One boat passes on the way to Hydra town, a dog standing poised on its prow like some old salt, the hero of a children’s story, his profile revealing a kind of canine
filotimo
, a proud sense of having mastered life at sea. I see my hosts already at a table overlooking the sea, with them a woman, and to my surprise, Lambros, the icon painter I met in Andros. He is painting some frescoes for their weekend house. The lady with the iron-gray cropped hair turns out to be another American, who tells me right away that Greece is her spiritual home, launching into a story about Knossos and how somewhere off the coast of Crete she is sure the lost testaments of Atlantis will be found, that we are on the verge. I reflect, not for the last time, that the romantic classicism which arrived here from the West has done this country little good, and settle down to hear the theology of the world underwater. At another table a fight breaks out between a little boy and his father, who hits him in the face. “You made me eat wood, you hit me,” the little boy complains, and the father pulls his head back like a disobedient dog’s and threatens him with more. The mother says nothing.