Dinner with Persephone (42 page)

This killing by a waitress and her boyfriend is a particular outrage to Greeks because of its violation of the honored idea of
filoxenia
, hospitality (literally, love of strangers), the sacred contract between guest and host. These killers murdered their hostess, another waitress whom they asked for help and a place to stay, pleading rough times financially. They killed her the first night of the
filoxenia
—she came home stumblingly tipsy, and after she went to bed, the murderers held her down, easy to do, since she was already incapacitated, and began to hit her in the face. The woman delivered the death blow, stabbing her, a murder by a woman of a woman in her own house. Then they put her body into a cupboard, ate, drank, and set aside what they wanted of her possessions, which
they gradually sold to secondhand shops. This murder is a double violation, a kind of rape committed by a woman, in a country where because of the dowry tradition, the house, together with its contents, is a symbol of woman, is itself a symbolic woman.

The parents of the murderer seem almost always to be interviewed in Greece, and here the mother of the murderess gives an account of her childhood. The mother tells the reporter she was married at sixteen, and had two boys and a girl, with a husband who continuously beat her and the children. After sixteen years of marriage, she brought herself to separate from him. She kept the boys and the girl went with her father to live in Crete. At age fifteen, the father put the girl in a reform school, saying she was ungovernable. The mother took her out of the reform school, but the girl, she said, despised her, and wanted to live with her father. At eighteen, the daughter gave birth to a baby boy, which she abandoned to her mother. The mother said she was bewildered by how her daughter had come to feel so much hate, and yet no one raises the question about how it was she chose to keep the boys but allowed the girl to live with a violent man, whom she must have witnessed repeatedly beating her mother. There is, it seems, an anthropology of murder, and it is apparent too in the way murders are reported. The story focuses only on the murderess; there is no biography or information about the murderer. And the headline defines the public, cultural aspect of the murder, the violation of the Greek host and guest relationship—“Her guests killed her,” it reads.

In the evening, I go back to church for the funeral of Christ. A
mirologhion
, a traditional Greek dirge of a kind that was common through the fifties and can still be heard in parts of the country, is sung. It is a kind of tribute and lament for the deceased, and can be sung by any acquaintance, although the ones I have read seem most often addressed by mothers to sons. Tonight’s dirge is sung by Mary to Christ, and next to me an old lady wearing a white napkinlike headdress joins softly in the refrain: “O my sweet Springtime, my most beloved Son, where has your beauty fled?” It is shocking to
hear Mary weep for Christ in words that must have been drawn from Aphrodite’s mourning for Adonis, and I suddenly realize what Stamatis meant when he said the Resurrection would surprise me. Christ will be buried tonight and and will rise again tomorrow night, but other tombs will unexpectedly release their dead, Adonis will rise with him, clinging to him through these words that belong to them both, like a brother buried in the same grave. Persephone, who pioneered this journey into hell and back, rises too. And the dead who burst out of the underworld and inhabit the flowers for forty days by the grace of Jesus? Are they only the human dead, or are they the minor deities, the nymphs, river gods, nereids, who in some eerie economy, having left the world when Christ entered it, now rise temporarily in his wake?

The streets tremble with the restless mass of people waiting to join the procession behind the carnation-covered bier. Boys in scout uniforms shoulder their simulated guns, and schoolgirls, the
myrrofores
, the myrrh-bearing women, carry baskets of flower petals to strew over the body of the dead Christ. The mothers are excitedly brushing the little girls’ hair, and the fathers are smoking—the emotional scale has tipped, and the anticipatory joy of tomorrow is already stronger than the ceremony of profound grief we have just completed. Now the atmosphere is like a parade, a Fellini-esque band, all white pith helmets and gleaming gold braid, with the naively cheerful sound of a military band strikes up the Chopin funeral march. We light our brown candles, following the pattern of an everyday Greek funeral, but when the march begins, the funeral train turns to pandemonium. All the downtown church processions confront each other competitively in the narrow streets, while spectators add to the confusion, lining the streets three-deep as they smoke and eat potato chips. The city is full of colliding Christs, a clash of only-begotten Sons.

On Saturday morning, I wake up to the sound of crashing dishes; they are being thrown out of windows onto the street, even from the hotel windows. I want a quiet day, since tonight and tomorrow
might be grueling, filled with pentathlons of Greek hospitality. I walk to the center of town to take a bus to a tiny harbor, where boats are moored like dreamed fragments of the sea, all painted in colors drawn from the sea, pale blue, a blue mixed with emerald, blues tinged with blacks and dark crimsons. On the way to the bus, I notice that the black and white lamb that was grazing yesterday outside the hotel has disappeared.

Saint Spyridion is the patron saint of Corfu, with a reputation for healing skin diseases. His body is kept in a case in a church dedicated to him, except when it is carried in procession for festivals, and crowds of people file past to petition him and pay their respects before the Resurrection service chanted over loudspeakers in Corfu’s central square. The church is a strange amalgam of Catholic and Orthodox decoration—no Pantokrator or Theotokos overhead, but a bad Italianate painted ceiling with scenes of Christ’s life encased in gold, and patterned floors marked with light tinted by stained glass that looks exactly like drops of blood staining the floor, which is strewn with bay leaves, the botany of victory celebrating Christ’s resurrection like an ancient Olympic athlete’s feat.

A tall man carrying a motorcycle helmet strides in and lights a candle from the bank of tapers at the church entrance. A
yiayia
sits on the steps at the foot of the choir stalls lining the body of the church; wearing a black scarf, black apron, and black stockings, she sits with her legs apart in the stance of someone peeling potatoes. A little girl fingers the bridal-gowned Barbie wrapped to her Easter candle, and a young boy absently swings his long candle rhythmically between his legs. A boy in a brilliant red and a girl in an emerald green sweater who cannot bear to unclasp their hands approach the saint together. Saint Spyridion is upright in his glass case now, whereas earlier this week he reclined. A throng of people are lined up to kiss his casket and to hang
tamata
on it, tin plaques with images of the dream the worshipper hopes the saint will fulfill in exchange for some vow or service. Saint Spyridion is as brown as a mezzotint when I go up to the casket, his head angled at an
uncomfortable-looking tilt. His feet are encased in silver and jeweled boots that remind me of Dorothy of Oz’s magic ruby slippers. A man in front of me videotapes his wife kissing the saint’s shoes. There are
tamata
on the casket with images of houses, cars, babies, limbs to be healed; someone who wants a degree, or a successful exam, or college acceptance has left an image of a man clutching a rolled-up diploma. Someone who wants to get married has left a plaque stamped with raised linked wedding crowns, the symbol of the Orthodox wedding. A woman holds her baby up to the corpse, and dips it for a moment so that the baby and the dead saint are face-to-face. On the walls, the painted frescoes of saints have faded away, but the gleaming silver casings remain, framing dissolved faces.

Outside, the crowd picks its way over the broken crockery tossed this morning; people are gathered on the balconies of hotels around the square to watch the Resurrection ceremony as they are on parade routes at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Vendors threaded through the square are selling popcorn, cotton candy, and yo-yos that glow in the dark. A little before midnight, a tiny colony of candles at the edge of the square begins to blaze, as the celebrant calls out “Come, receive the light.” There is a sexual, tender, exalted, and tragic moment as candle touches candle, brief life kindling brief life, again and again, like the moment of conception: “Christ is Risen” pours the chant from the loudspeaker; the crowd sings with him, light being born from candle to candle, and a crash of purple and green falls from the sky, as with the sounds of hell opening, an earthquake of graves opening, the fireworks begin. Official fireworks hold the center of the
plateia
, unofficial ones set off by children and teenagers go off at the periphery. Kostas told me that every year there were casualties and deaths from homemade fireworks, and as he predicted, there was a story in today’s paper about the death of a young boy in Chios making his firecrackers on the eve of the Resurrection. A particularly loud crash sounds as we weave our way to the street, and someone says with a thrill of pleasure, “What happened, what happened?” I pass a popcorn vendor who has lit a candle and placed it in an empty plastic bottle of salt, to free her
hands to sell the bags of popcorn. It is good luck to keep your candle flame alive until you reach home, or someplace you have declared home, and I and my hosts maneuver our flames away from the wind on the way to the restaurant to break the fast. There is a pandemonium of people running now from the square, holding lit candles, all eager to get places in the restaurants, which are throwing reservations to the wind and placing people at tables first come first served. At my table, the hostess takes a supply of red eggs out of her Fendi handbag and hands them around for us to crack against our neighbors’; she asks a waiter for some empty water glasses to keep our candles in, so they will stay lit all through dinner, and we make a bouquet of them. They look like a new kind of white-stemmed flower in their transparent water glasses, with flames for petals. The discos are just getting under way as we return home.

On Easter Sunday, a couple named Stratis and Jocasta who are invited to the same Easter dinner in the country have offered me a ride. While I am waiting for them, I watch a harangue by an Orthodox monk on an independent TV channel. He accuses the Vatican and the EEC of a covert agreement to divide Greece among the rest of Europe, and shows a map he claims has been secretly produced to show how “the former Greece” will look, comparing it to the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. He invokes the Asia Minor catastrophe, Cyprus, the civil war, gripped by imaginings of disintegration, shrieking in a feverish rhapsody that the Orthodox Church hates no one, it is filled only with love. Part of what makes Greek politics so undecipherable is its tangle of paranoia and lived experience, the one adhering to the other like a tumor on a healthy organ.

We take an ugly road out of Corfu town, past rows of cheap beach hotels and supermarkets flanked by white plastic versions of classical sculpture and billboard cutouts of slim-waisted men from Minoan frescoes. Next to a half-finished building, amid a pile of iron and concrete rubble, a man turns a lamb on a spit. A wall near him is covered with sprawling graffiti: “Say no to the new Masonic identity cards—no to the new identity 666.” “Armenians say no to Pan-Turkism,”
“The Albanians are our enemies,” “The Turkish people will win.” We pass a video store whose exterior is covered with brightly colored posters for old movies. Underneath
O Politis Kein
, Citizen Kane, a woman turns a spit on which a whole lamb is darkening, a plume of the fragrant cooking smoke the old gods loved to smell rising from its body. Here and there along the road, a road where because it winds through cliffs, you can look both up and down, onto people’s houses and shops and below them, you see these plumes of smoke, or a family gathered around a laden outdoor table, or a lamb, spit run through its head, roasting on one of the concrete terraces attached to newer Greek houses. After fifteen or twenty minutes, the coast becomes the recognizable jewel-like coast whose beauty was perhaps, in the end, a fatal gift to the island. The bays curve like beautiful women’s cleavage, and are watched by hideous concrete hotels that hover over them like voyeurs.

Stratis and Jocasta want to drop off a bouquet of Easter flowers and a bottle of wine for friends. We walk up to their small farm past a flock of
baa
ing lambs who survived the Resurrection. The farm couple are roasting their lamb outdoors in a cloud of flies, as their big brown-eyed dog watches attentively. It is impossible to watch the lamb turning, with its eyes looking coldly angry and its teeth bared, and not see a kind of substitute crucifixion. The wife brings us a bowl of blood red eggs, and sweet wine, like a mead, in the coppery wine pitcher Greeks use for their barrel wine, and watches the lamb turning. “I can’t help thinking about Athanasios Diakos,” she says ruefully, referring to a Greek hero of 1821, who abandoned a future as a monk to fight for Greek independence. Diakos, whose presence in ballads and image is as ubiquitous as George Washington’s, was famous for his beauty—he is always shown with a romantic head of shoulder-length curling hair and a magnificent broad-shouldered body. He was also famous for a hideous death at the hands of the Turks, by a method of execution used both by Turks and Greeks at the time: he was run through with a spit and roasted alive over an open fire.

Her husband sips a beer, and makes the dog do a favorite trick, calling to it “Dig for potatoes.” The dog acts out scrabbling for potatoes, and is rewarded with a chunk of lamb. “It is a very clever dog,” they say proudly. They insist on our staying for a first bite of lamb, which they announce is done. The wife runs into the house and brings out a sheet; together they remove the lamb from the spit and wrap it in the sheet, and the wife repeatedly slams the lamb onto the ground, bashing it against the earth with all her strength, so that the lamb will fall off the bone, she explains, and will not need to be carved. Again and again, she raises her arms and hurls the animal violently to the ground, until her husband says, “All right, all right, you’ve killed it.” They carry it to a picnic table, and invite us to take a piece with our fingers, but since they forgot to take the lamb’s head off at the end, the carcass is slathered with brains.