NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (49 page)

“I was on a Saga ship, cruising to Bali,” Jack Greenwald said. “Forty-one passengers and a hundred and eighty crew members. Can you imagine the number of times I was asked, ‘Is everything all right?’ ”

Over dessert—again Jack was having two, and being very careful not
to spill any on his regimental tie—and perhaps because I had not asked, he volunteered that he had been the producer of a number of plays and revues. The names he mentioned meant nothing to me.
Up Tempo
was one. It rang no bells.
The Long, the Short and the Tall?
Nope. Titles of plays or musicals, because they were usually reworded clichés, sounded familiar but inspired no memories.

“Suddenly This Summer?”

“Rings a bell.”

“Parody of Tennessee Williams,” Jack said. “Did very well.”

“Before my time, I think.”

“I sometimes have problems with writers,” he said. “There was one that made problems. I had to pay him two-fifty a night for one joke he had written. Just one line.”

“What was the line?”

“Someone in the cast says, ‘Will the real Toulouse-Lautrec please stand up?’ ”

“That’s not very funny,” I said.

“No. And the writer complained that he was not being paid on time. His lawyer sent me a big long lawyer letter. I said to myself, ‘Hell with it,’ and took the line out. Writers.”

“That’s what I do for a living.”

“Know the story about the writer?” he said. “Writer makes it big in Hollywood and wants to impress his mother. So he invites her out to visit him. She takes the train and he goes to the station with flowers, but he doesn’t see her anywhere. Finally he goes to the police station to see whether they know anything, and he spots her there. ‘Ma, why didn’t you have me paged at the station?’ She says, ‘I forgot your name.’ ”

“That’s not funny either,” I said, but I was laughing.

“It’s odd, isn’t it, Brownie?” he said to his wife. “We’ve broken our rule. We’ve actually had dinner with another passenger.”

“I hope that wasn’t too painful for you,” Constance said to me.

“Tomorrow I’ll tell you how I made some lucky investments in the Arctic,” Jack said. “Frobisher Bay. Making a deal with some Eskimos while they ate a raw seal on the floor. I’m not joking.”

• • •

After a man has made a large amount of money he usually becomes a bad listener. Jack Greenwald was not a man in that mold, he was not in a hurry, and he was a tease, but with an air of mystery. “I happen to be something of an authority on Persian carpets,” he would say. Or it might be Kashmiri sapphires, or gold alloys, or oil embargoes. If I challenged him I was usually proven wrong.

These deals in the Canadian Arctic, this talk of “my carver,” “my goldsmith,” and the billiard room he was planning to build, with a blue felt on the billiard table, made him seem like the strange tycoon Harry Oakes, whom he somewhat resembled physically; but there was an impish side to him too, a love of wearing Mephisto sneakers with his dinner jacket, and a compulsion to buy hats, and wear them, and a tendency to interrupt a boring story with a joke.

“Hear the one about the eighty-year-old with the young wife?” Jack said, when the subject of Galaxídhion, our next port, was raised in the smoking room, where he had just set a Cuban cigar aflame. “His friend says, ‘Isn’t that bad for the heart?’ The old man says, ‘If she dies, she dies.’ ”

I had fled from Corfu after arriving on the boat from Albania. I had tried and failed to get to Ulysses’ home island of Ithaca. But there was only one ferry a week. The
Seabourn
passed south of it in the night and I felt I had returned to roughly where I had left off and was continuing my Mediterranean progress. I had felt a deep aversion to Corfu which even in the low season was a tourist island. The whole of Greece seemed to me a cut-price theme park of broken marble, a place where you were harangued in a high-minded way about Ancient Greek culture while some swarthy little person picked your pocket. That, and unlimited Turkophobia.

We had sailed south of the large island of Cephalonia, and passed Missolonghi, where Lord Byron had died, into the Gulf of Corinth, anchoring off the small Greek village of Galaxídhion, on a bay just below Delphi. Indeed, beneath the glittering slopes of Mount Parnassus.

Tenders took us ashore, where we were greeted by the guides.

“My name is Clea. The driver’s name is Panayotis. His name means ‘The Most Holy.’ He has been named after the Blessed Virgin.”

The driver smiled at us and puffed his cigarette and waved.

“Apollo came here,” Clea said.

Near this bauxite mine? Great red piles of earth containing bauxite, used to make aluminum, had been quarried from depths of Itea under Delphi to await transshipment to Russia, which has a monopoly on Greek bauxite. In return, Russia swaps natural gas with Greece. Such a simple arrangement: we give you red dirt, you give us gas. Apollo came here?

“He strangled the python to prove his strength as a god,” Clea went on, and without missing a beat, “The yacht
Christina
came here as well, after Aristotle Onassis married Jackie Kennedy, for their honeymoon cruise.”

Through an olive grove that covered a great green plain with thousands of olive trees, not looking at all well after a three-month drought, we climbed the cliff to Delphi, the center of the world. The navel itself, a little stone toadstool
omphalos
, is there on the slope for all to see.

“I must say several things to you about how to act,” Clea began.

There followed some nannyish instructions about showing decorum near the artifacts. This seemed very odd piety. It was also a recent fetish. After almost two thousand years of neglect, during which Greek temples and ruins had been pissed on and ransacked—the ones that had not been hauled away (indeed, rescued for posterity) by people like Lord Elgin had been used to make the walls of peasant huts—places like Delphi were discovered by intrepid Germans and Frenchmen and dug up.

Delphi had not been operational since the time of Christ. In the reign of Claudius (
A.D.
51), “the site was impoverished and half-deserted,” Michael Grant writes in his
Guide to the Ancient World
, “and Nero was said to have carried 500 statues away.” Delphi was officially shut down and cleared by the Emperor Theodosius (379–95), who was an active campaigner for Christianity. It is no wonder that what remains of Delphi are some stumpy columns and the vague foundations of the temples—hardly anything in fact except a stony hillside and a guide’s Hellenistic sales pitch. Anyone inspired to visit Delphi on the basis of Henry Miller’s manic and stuttering flapdoodle in
The Colossus of Maroussi
would be in for a disappointment.

The Greeks had not taken very much interest in their past until Europeans became enthusiastic discoverers and diggers of their ruins. And why should they have cared? The Greeks were not Greek, but rather the
illiterate descendants of Slavs and Albanian fishermen, who spoke a debased Greek dialect and had little interest in the broken columns and temples except as places to graze their sheep. The true philhellenists were the English—of whom Byron was the epitome—and the French, who were passionate to link themselves with the Greek ideal. This rampant and irrational phili-Hellenism, which amounted almost to a religion, was also a reaction to the confident dominance of the Ottoman Turks, who were widely regarded as savages and heathens. The Turks had brought their whole culture, their language, the Muslim religion, and their distinctive cuisine not only here but throughout the Middle East and into Europe, as far as Budapest. The contradiction persists, even today: Greek food is actually Turkish food, and many words we think of as distinctively Greek, are in reality Turkish—
kebab, doner, kofta, meze, taramasalata, dolma, yogurt, moussaka
, and so forth; all Turkish.

Signs at the entrance to Delphi said,
Show proper respect
and
It is forbidden to sing or make loud noises
and
Do not pose in front of ancient stones.

I saw a pair of rambunctious Greek youths being reprimanded by an officious little man, for flinging their arms out and posing for pictures. The man twitched a stick at them and sent them away.

Why was this? It was just what you would expect to happen if you put a pack of ignoramuses in charge of a jumble of marble artifacts they had no way of comprehending. They would in their impressionable stupidity begin to venerate the mute stones and make up a lot of silly rules. This
Show proper respect
business and
No posing
was an absurd and desperate transfer of the orthodoxies of the Greeks’ tenacious Christianity, as they applied the severe prohibitions of their church to the ruins. Understanding little of the meaning of the stones, they could only see them in terms of their present religious belief; and so they imposed a sort of sanctity on the ruins. This ludicrous solemnity was universal in Greece. Women whose shorts were too tight and men wearing bathing suits were not allowed to enter the stadium above Delphi, where the ancients had run races stark ballocky naked. In some Greek places photography of ruins was banned as sacrilegious.

In spite of this irrationality, the place was magical, because of its natural setting, the valley below Delphi, the edge of a steep slope, the pines,
the shimmering hills of brilliant rock, the glimpse of Mount Parnassus. Delphi was magnificent for the view it commanded, for the way it looked outward on the world. The site had also been chosen for the smoking crack in the earth that it straddled, that made the Oracle, a crone balancing on her tripod, choke and gasp and deliver riddles.

“‘What kind of child will I give birth to?’ someone would ask the Oracle,” Clea said. “And the Oracle was clever. She would say, ‘Boy not girl,’ and that could mean boy or girl, because of the inflection.”

“I don’t get it,” someone said. “If the Oracle could see the future, why did she bother to speak in riddles?”

“To make the people wonder.”

“But if she really was an Oracle, huh, why didn’t she just tell the truth?”

“It was the way that oracles spoke in those days,” Clea said feebly.

“Doesn’t that mean she really didn’t know the answer?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t that mean she was just making the whole thing up?”

This made Clea cross. But the scholar Michael Grant describes how the prophecies were conservative and adaptable to circumstances, and he writes of the Oracle, “Some have … preferred to ascribe the entire phenomenon to clever stage management, aided by an effective information system.”

Clea took us to the museum, where one magnificent statue, a life-sized bronze of a charioteer, was worth the entire climb up the hill. As for the rest I had some good historical sound bites for my growing collection.

—The Oracle sat on this special kettle and said her prophecies.

—Pericles had very big ears, which is why he is always shown wearing a helmet.

On the way back to the ship, while the guide was telling the story of Oedipus—how he got his name, and killed his father, and married his mother, while frowning and somewhat shocked
Seabourn
passengers listened—I began to talk to the Cornacchias, Joe and Eileen, who told me about their recent win at the Kentucky Derby. It was the second time a horse of theirs had been triumphant—“Strike the Gold” had won in 1991, and “Go for Gin” this year.

“What’s your secret?” I asked.

“I have a very good trainer who knows horses. He feels their muscles. I also have a geneticist, who checks them out. It’s a science, you know.”

The Cornacchias lived on the north shore of Long Island, some miles east of Gatsby country. Eileen was an admiring and pleasant person and Joe an unassuming man, who did not boast. He was also very big. “I tell the horses, ‘If you don’t win, I’m going to ride you.’ ”

“What was the purse this year?”

“I won eight-point-one million bucks. Broke even.”

“Where’s the profit, then?”

“ ‘Go for Gin’ is starting to make money as a stud.”

Back on the ship, we resumed our voyage, and as the sun set behind Corinth we slid through the narrow Corinth Canal, with just a few feet to spare on either side. Jack Greenwald stood on deck in his blazer, smoking a thick Monte Cristo, waving to the Corinthians on shore.

At the
Seabourn
dinners when black tie was requested, two or three a week, it was impossible to tell the waiters from the passengers. The night before we arrived in the port of Piraeus, a variety of caviar was served that reminded Jack Greenwald of something he had once eaten in the Arctic. This became a long story about narwhal tusks, “an area in which I am one of the few living specialists.”

“I have two very important things to do in Athens,” Jack said to me on deck after dinner. “Make a phone call, and buy a captain’s hat. I want one of those real hats—not one with braid. And the phone call is about my cat.”

“Yes?”

“My cat is a diabetic,” he said. “We must have a medical update. Isn’t that right, Constance?”

On the quay the next day I said that we would save money and time if we took the train the twenty miles or so from Piraeus to Athens. Good idea, he said, and waved away the taxi driver he had been speaking to. But on the way to the train station Jack became bored, and he turned around to see the taxi driver dogging our heels, still whining.

“Please don’t say another word,” Jack said. “I will give you a hundred dollars if you stick with us all day.”

That was fine with the taxi driver, whose name was Leonides. He took us to a jewelry shop. Jack: “Is that your cousin?” Leonides took us to a restaurant. Jack: “You have relatives everywhere.” Leonides had a blue eye on his key chain, a talisman against the evil eye. Jack: “You actually believe that stuff?”

“I’m going to tell Leonides I’m in love with him,” Jack said. “Just see what he says.”

In a wintry voice, Constance said, “Behave yourself.”

“Tell me about your king,” Jack said.

“King Constantine,” Leonides said. “Since one year he come to the Greek.”

“Were you happy?”