Report to Grego (22 page)

A shadow fell next to my own. Turning, I saw a Catholic priest. He looked at me and smiled.

“Abbé Mugnier,” he said, holding out his hand. “Would you care to keep me company? I don't know modern Greek, only ancient:
 . . .”

“. . .
 . . .” I continued.

Laughing, we continued to declaim the immortal verses as we proceeded. I learned subsequently that this abbé who laughed and recited, a tuft of gray hair fluttering over his forehead, was celebrated for his sancity and intelligence. In Paris he had led many well-known atheists back to the fold. Endowed with a sparkling mind, he frequented the world, talking and joking with great ladies, but behind this playful, mobile exterior loomed Christ crucified, an immobile, impregnable rock. No, not Christ crucified, Christ resurrected.

The custodian hurried forward to greet us and explain the site. He was a simple, jovial Cretan who wore vrakes and carried a large crook. His name was David. In his many years as custodian and guide at Knossos he had learned much. He spoke of the palace as though it were his home, received us in the capacity of master of the house.

Taking the lead, he extended his crook to indicate the sites.

“Before you is the great royal court, sixty meters long, twenty-nine meters wide. Here are the storerooms with their huge decorated jars. In here the king stocked his produce in order to feed his
people. We found sediment from wine and olive oil in the jars, also olive pits, beans, chick-peas, wheat, barley, and lentils. Everything was carbonized by great fires.”

We climbed to the upper story. On all sides: short, thick columns colored black and purple. In the passageways we saw wall paintings of flowers, shields, and bulls. We reached the high terrace. The happy domesticated landscape stretched all around us; at the center of the horizon lay Yioúchtas, Zeus's supine head. The half-crumbling, half-restored palace gleamed with brilliance after thousands of years, once more enjoying Crete's masculine sunlight. In this palace one does not see the balanced geometric architecture of Greece. Reigning here are imagination, grace, and the free play of man's creative power. This palace grew and proliferated in the course of time, slowly, like a living organism, a tree. It was not built once and for all with a fixed, premeditated plan; it grew by additions, playing and harmonizing with the ever-renewed necessities of the times. Man was not guided here by inflexible, untrickable logic. The intellect was useful, but as a servant, not a master. The master was something or someone else. What name could we give it?

Turning to the abbé, I revealed my thoughts and asked his opinion.

“You want to know who the master was?” he answered with a smile. “What do you expect a priest to tell you except God? The Cretans' god was the master; He guided their hands and minds, and they created. God was the master builder. And this Cretan god was as nimble and playful as the sea which embraces the island. This is why landscape, palace, paintings, and sea have such a faultless harmony and unity.”

Descending the stone stairway, we gazed in silence at the paintings on the walls: bulls, lilies, fish in the blue sea, the flying fish that spread their fins to leap above the waves, as though water, their maternal element, stifled them and they wished to inhale a more rarefied atmosphere. We halted at the theater. Here the guide caught fire.

“This is where the bullfights took place,” he said, his face glowing with pride. “But the Cretan bullfights were not like the barbarous ones in Spain. There, so I'm told, the bull is killed and the horses disemboweled. Here the bullfight was a bloodless game.
Man and bull played together. The bullfighter grasped the bull by the horns, the beast became angry and tossed his head high in the air, which enabled the bullfighter to gain momentum and jump with a nimble somersault onto the bull's back. Then he made a second somersault and landed on his feet behind the bull's tail, where a young girl was waiting to clasp him in her arms.”

The abbé had fixed his gaze upon the theater's stone tiers, apparently struggling to draw the divine game freshly into the light. I explained the custodian's words to him.

He took me by the arm. We continued on.

“It is terribly difficult to play bloodlessly with God,” he murmured.

We stopped at a square column of glazed plaster, at the top of which was incised the sacred sign: the double-edged axe. The abbé joined his hands together, bent his knee for a moment, and moved his lips as though in prayer.

I was astonished. “What—are you praying?” I asked him.

“Of course I am praying, my young friend. Every race and every age gives God its own mask. But behind all the masks, in every age and every race, is always the same never-changing God.”

He fell silent, but after a moment: “We have the cross as our sacred sign; your most ancient ancestors had the double-edged axe. But I push aside the ephemeral symbols and discern the same God behind both the cross and the double-edged axe, discern Him and do obeisance.”

I was very young at that time. On that day I did not understand, but years later my mind was able to contain those words and make them bear fruit. Then I too began to discern the eternal, immutable face of God behind all religious symbols. And still later, when my mind grew overbroad and my heart overbold, I began to discern something behind God's face as well—chaos, a terrifying uninhabited darkness. Without meaning to, this holy abbé had opened a road for me on that day at Knossos. I took this road, but I did not stop where he would have liked me to stop. Possessed by satanic curiosity, I went further and discovered the abyss.

We sat down between two columns. The fiery sky gleamed like steel. The crickets in the olive groves surrounding the palace were deafening. The custodian leaned against the column, removed his tobacco pouch from beneath his belt, and began to roll a cigarette.
None of us spoke. We sensed the sacredness of moment and place, and knew that silence alone was fitting. Two doves flew above our heads and perched on one of the columns. These were the sacred birds of the Great Goddess worshiped here by the Cretans. Sometimes they are seen sitting on a column, sometimes being held by the goddess between her two milk-swollen breasts.

“Doves . . . ” I said softly, as though afraid that they might be scared away by the sound of my voice and leave the column.

The abbé placed his finger over his lips. “Quiet,” he whispered.

Though my mind was overflowing with questions, I did not speak. The extraordinary murals passed again before my sight: large almond-shaped eyes, cascades of black tresses, imposing matrons with bare breasts and thick voluptuous lips, birds—pheasant and partridge—blue monkeys, princes with peacock feathers in their hair, fierce holy bulls, tender-aged priestesses with sacred snakes wrapped around their arms, blue boys in flowering gardens. Joy, strength, great wealth; a world full of mystery, an Atlantis which had issued from the depths of the Cretan soil. This world looked at us with immense black eyes, but its lips were still sealed.

What kind of world is this? I asked myself. When will it open its lips and speak? What feats did these forebears accomplish here on the very soil we are now treading?

Crete served as the first bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa. Crete was the first place in a then totally dark Europe to become enlightened. And it was here too that the Greek soul accomplished its destined mission: it reduced God to the scale of man. Here in Crete the monstrous immovable statues of Egypt or Assyria became small and graceful, with bodies that moved, mouths that smiled; the features and stature of God took on the features and stature of man. A new, original humanity full of agility, grace, and oriental luxury lived and played on the Cretan soil, a humanity which differed from the subsequent Greeks.

As I looked about me at the small domesticated hills, the sparsely leafed olive trees, a slender slowly swaying cypress which rose among the rocks; as I listened to the light harmonious tinkling from some invisible flock of goats and inhaled the fragrant sea breeze that straddled the hill, the age-old Cretan secret penetrated me ever more deeply, I believe, and became less and less obscure. This secret is concerned not with supramundane problems
but with everyday ones in all their fervent detail, with the incessantly renewed problems of man's life here upon this earth.

“What are you thinking about?” the abbé asked me.

“About Crete . . .” I replied.

“I too was thinking about Crete,” said my companion. “Crete and my soul. . . . If it is given me to be reborn, I should like to see the light again here, on this soil. Some sort of invisible witchcraft exists here. . . . Come, let's go.”

Getting up, we threw a final, slow-moving glance at the extraordinary sight. I would see it again, but the abbé whispered with a sigh, “Farewell . . . farewell for the last time.”

He waved his hand at the columns, the courtyards, the murals.

“Farewell. From the ends of the earth a Catholic priest came to do obeisance to you. He did obeisance. Now, farewell.”

We started back. The terribly hot and dusty road made the abbé tired. We stopped at a little monastery occupied by dervishes who danced every Friday. The arched doorway was green and had an open hand of bronze—Mohammed's sacred symbol—on the lintel. We entered the immaculate courtyard. It was paved with large white pebbles; there were flowerpots and creepers all around the edges, and in the center a huge fruit-laden laurel. We stopped beneath its shade to catch our breath. One of the dervishes saw us from his cell. Approaching, he greeted us by placing his hand over his breast, lips, and forehead. He was wearing a long blue robe and a tall kulah of white wool. His beard was pitch black and pointed; a silver earring hung from his right ear. He clapped his hands. A chubby barefooted boy came and brought us some stools. We sat down. The dervish chatted about the flowers we saw around us, then about the sea, which we observed sparkling between the laurel's lanceolate leaves. Finally he began to speak about dancing.

“If a man cannot dance, he cannot pray. Angels have mouths but lack the power of speech. They speak to God by dancing.”

“Father, what name do you give God?” asked the abbé.

“God does not have a name,” the dervish replied. “He is too big to fit inside names. A name is a prison, God is free.”

“But in case you should want to call Him,” the abbé persisted, “when there is need, what name will you use?”

The dervish bowed his head and thought. Finally he parted his lips:

“
Ah!
—that is what I shall call Him. Not Allah, but
Ah!
”

This troubled the abbé. “He's right,” he murmured.

The chubby little dervish boy appeared again, this time with a tray containing coffee, cold water, and two large bunches of grapes. A pair of doves flirted and cooed on the roof above us. Were they the same we had seen at Knossos? When we fell silent for a moment, the monasterial air filled with amorous sighs. I turned to the abbé. He was gazing upward at the doves and the sky beyond them, his eyes brimming with tears.

He felt that I was watching him.

“The world is beautiful,” he said with a smile. “Yes, it is beautiful in the lands of the sun—wherever you find blue skies, and doves, and grapes. And a laurel above you.”

He was eating his grapes one by one in perfect contentment. You could sense that he hoped this moment would never end.

“Even if I were certain I was going to heaven,” he said, “I would pray God to let me go by the longest possible route.”

So happy did we feel in the courtyard of the Mohammedan monastery, we could not bear to leave.

Other dervishes emerged from the surrounding cells. The younger ones had pale faces and fiery eyes; they seemed in desperate pursuit of God. The old ones, who must have found God, were red-cheeked, their eyes filled with light. They squatted around us. Some unhooked chaplets from their leather belts and started to tell their beads tranquilly, gazing with curiosity at the Christian monk. Others brought out their long chibouks, half closed their eyes, and began contentedly, silently, to smoke.