Report to Grego (23 page)

“What joy this is,” whispered the abbé. “How brightly the Lord's face shines here too, behind all these faces!”

He touched my shoulder in an imploring way.

“Please, the dervishes are a religious order. Ask them what their rule is.”

The oldest of the group, a man with a long white beard, laid his chibouk on his knee.

“Poverty,” he answered. “Poverty. To own nothing, be weighted down by nothing, to journey to God along a flowering pathway. Laughter, the dance, and joy are the three archangels who take us by the hand and lead us.”

The abbé turned to me again. “Ask them how they make themselves ready to appear before God. Is it by fasting?”

“No, no,” answered a young dervish with a laugh. “We eat, drink, and bless the Lord for giving food and drink to man.”

“Well then, how?” insisted the abbé.

“By dancing,” replied the oldest dervish, the one with the long white beard.

“Dancing?” said the abbé. “Why?”

“Because dancing kills the ego, and once the ego has been killed, there is no further obstacle to prevent you from joining with God.”

The abbé's eyes sparkled.

“The order of Saint Francis!” he exclaimed, squeezing the old dervish's hand. “That's just what Saint Francis did: he danced his way across the earth and mounted to heaven. He used to say, ‘What are we but God's buffoons, born to soothe and delight the hearts of men.' So, my young friend, once more you see—always, always the same never-changing God.”

“But in that case,” I dared to object, “why do missionaries go to the four corners of the world and try to make the natives renounce the mask of God which suits them, in order to put on a foreign mask—ours—in its place?”

The abbé rose.

“I find it very difficult to answer that question,” he said. “If, God willing, you should come to Paris to complete your studies, call at my house.”

He smiled cunningly.

“Perhaps by then I shall have found the answer.”

We said goodbye to the dervishes. They escorted us to the outer door with smiles and bows, once again touching their hands to breast, mouth, and forehead.

On the threshold the abbé said to me, “Tell them, please, that we all worship the same God. Tell them I am a dervish in a black robe.”

M
Y
FATHER
had promised me a year of travel, wherever I wanted to go, if I took my degree with highest honors. The reward was a great one, and I threw myself heart and soul into my studies. One of my friends, a devilishly clever Cretan, was going to take his examinations with me. The crucial day arrived. We started together for the university, both extremely uneasy. I had known everything and forgotten everything. My memory was a void; I felt terrified.

“Do you remember anything at all?” my friend asked me.

“Not a thing.”

“Neither do I. Let's go to a beerhall to drink, get soused, and loosen our tongues. That's the way my father went to war—drunk.”

“Come on.”

We drank, drank some more, began to feel happy.

“How does the world look to you?” asked my friend.

“Double.”

“Me too. Can you walk?”

I got up and took a few steps.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Then let's go. Roman Law—tremble!”

We set out arm in arm at first, but then each worked up courage and continued on his own two feet.

“Hi, Bacchus my stalwart!” I cried. “Give Justinian and his Novels the old hammer lock. Lay him out cold on the ground!”

“Why call on Bacchus?” my friend asked. “We drank beer, not wine.”

“Are you sure?”

“You don't believe me? Let's go back and ask.”

We went back.

“Beer, beer,” the owner of the establishment assured us, splitting his sides with laughter. “Where are you headed, gents?”

“To take our law exams.”

“Wait, I'll come along for the laughs.”

He removed his apron and followed behind. The professors were waiting for us. Enthroned as they were, all in a row, they seemed like so many gnats. Our brains spat fire. With immense gusto we answered their questions, answered them with a nonchalance somewhat insolent, mixing in Latin tags with great frequency. Our tongues wagged incessantly, and we both came out with highest honors.

We were overjoyed. My friend planned to establish a law office in Crete and enter politics, while I rejoiced because a door of escape was opening for me. All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel—to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, peoples, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows. This alchemy of the heart is, I believe, a great delight which all men deserve.

The canary, the magic bird my father gave me as a New Year's present when I was a child, had become a carcass years before; no, not “become a carcass”—I blush that this expression escaped me—had “passed away” I meant to say, passed away like a human. Or better still, had “rendered its song up to God.” We buried it in our little courtyard-garden. My sister cried, but I was calm because I knew that as long as I remained alive, I would never allow it to perish. “I won't let you perish,” I whispered as I covered it over with earth. “We shall live and travel together.”

When I grew older, left Crete, and wandered over the earth's surface, I always felt this canary clinging to my scalp and singing—singing the identical refrain over and over again, incessantly: “Let's get up and leave. Why are we sitting here? We are birds, not oysters. Let's get up and leave.” My head had become a terrestial
globe with the canary, perched at its pole, raising its warm throat toward heaven and singing.

I've heard that in the old days the concubines of the harem stood in a row each evening in their garden, freshly bathed and scented, their breasts uncovered, and the sultan came down to make his choice. In his hand he held a little handkerchief which he thrust beneath the armpit of each and then sniffed. He chose the woman whose aroma pleased him the most that evening.

It was like concubines that the various countries lined themselves up in a row before me.

Hastily, avidly, I swept my eyes over the map. Where to go? Which continent, which ocean to see first? All the countries held out their hands and invited me. The world was extensive, praise the Lord, and—let idlers say what they will—man's life was extensive too. We would have time to see and enjoy all countries.

Why not begin with Greece!

M
y pilgrimage through Greece lasted three months. Even now after so many years my heart throbs with happiness and inquietude when I recall the mountains, islands, villages, monasteries, and coast lines. It is a great joy to travel through Greece and see it, a great joy and an agony.

I traveled through Greece, and gradually I began to see with my eyes and touch with my hands something that abstract thought cannot touch or see: the means by which strength and grace combine. I doubt that these two ingredients of perfection, Ares and Aphrodite, have ever joined together so organically in any other part of the world, have ever joined together so organically as in the austere, ever-smiling land of Greece. Some of her regions are severe and haughty, others full of feminine tenderness, still others serious and at the same time cheerful and gracious. But the spirit passed over all of them and by means of a temple, myth, or hero bequeathed the proper, suitable soul to each. That is why whoever journeys in Greece and has eyes to see with and a mind to think with, journeys in an unbroken magical unity from one spiritual victory to another. In Greece a person confirms the fact that spirit is the continuation and flower of matter, and myth the simple, composite expression of the most positive reality. The spirit has
trodden upon the stones of Greece for many, many years; no matter where you go, you discover its divine traces.

Various regions in Greece are dual in nature, and the emotion which springs from them is also dual in nature. Harshness and tenderness stand side by side, complementing each other and coupling like a man with a woman. Sparta is one such source of tenderness and harshness. In front of you stands Taygetus, a hard, disdainful legislator full of cliffs and precipices, while below, stretched out at your feet like a woman in love, is the fruited, seductive plain. On the one hand Taygetus, the Mount Sinai of Greece, where the pitiless god of the Race dictates the most rigid of commandments: life is war, the world is a battlefield, your sole duty is to win; do not sleep, do not adorn yourselves, laugh, or talk; fighting is your sole purpose in life, therefore fight! And on the other hand, at Taygetus's foot—Helen. Just as you begin to grow savage and to disdain the earth's sweetness, suddenly Helen's breath, like a flowering lemon tree, makes your mind reel.

Is this Spartan plain really so tender and voluptuous? I wonder. Is the fragrance of its oleanders really so intoxicating—or does all this fascination perhaps spring from Helen's oft-kissed far-roving body? Certainly Eurotas would not possess its present-day seductive grace had it not flowed as a tributary into Helen's immortal myth. For lands, seas, and rivers, as we well know, join with great beloved names and, evermore inseparable from them, flow into our hearts. Walk along the humble banks of the Eurotas and you feel your hands, hair, and thoughts become entangled in the perfume of an imaginary woman far more real, far more tangible, than the woman you love and touch. The world today is drowning in blood, passions rage in our present-day anarchistic hell, yet Helen, immortal and untouched, stands unmovable in the air of her extraordinary verses while time flows by in front of her.

The soil was fragrant; the dewdrops hanging from the lemon flowers capered in the sunlight. Suddenly a gentle breeze blew and a flower struck my forehead, sprinkling me with dew. A quiver ran through me, as though I had been touched by an invisible hand. The whole earth seemed a freshly bathed, laughing-weeping Helen. She was lifting her veils with their embroidered lemon flowers and, her palm to her mouth, her virginity constantly renewed, following a man, the strongest that could be found. And as
she raised her legs with their snow-white, ankles, the round soles of her feet gleamed with blood.

What would this Helen have been if Homer's breath had not passed over her? A beautiful woman like countless others who made their passage across this earth and perished. She would have been abducted, just as pretty girls are still frequently abducted in our mountain villages. And even if this abduction had ignited a war, everything—the war, the woman, the slaughter—would have perished if the Poet had not reached out his hand to save them. It is to the Poet that Helen owes her salvation; it is to Homer that this tiny riverbed, Eurotas, owes its immortality. Helen's smile suffuses all the Spartan air. But even beyond this, she has entered our very blood streams. Every man has partaken of her in communion; to this day every woman reflects her splendor. Helen has become a love cry. She traverses the centuries, awakens in every man the yearning for kisses and perpetuation. She transforms every woman we clasp to our breast, even the most commonplace, into a Helen.

Thanks to this Spartan queen, sexual desire assumes exalted titles of nobility; the secret nostalgia for some lost embrace sweetens the brute within us. When we weep or cry out, Helen throws a magic herb into the bitter dram we are drinking, and we completely forget our pain. In her hand she holds a flower whose scent drives off serpents. At her touch ugly children become beautiful. She straddles the goat of the ancient Bacchic rites, shakes her foot with its untied sandal, and the entire world is transformed into a vineyard. One day when the ancient poet Stesichorus uttered an uncomplimentary word about her in one of his odes, he was immediately struck blind. Then, trembling and repentant, he took his lyre, stood up before the Greeks at a great festival, and sang the famous palinode:

What I said about you is not true, Helen;

you never boarded the swift ships,

nor did you ever reach the citadel of Troy.

H
e wept, holding his hands aloft; and all at once the light, submerged in tears, descended to the corners of his eyes.

Our ancestors held beauty contests in her honor, the “Heleneia.”
Truly, the earth is a palaestra and Helen the unattainable achievement, the achievement beyond life, perhaps nonexistent, perhaps just a phantom. In one of the mystery cults the tradition confided to initiates was that the Achaeans did not fight at Troy for the true Helen, that only her image was discovered in Troy, that the real Helen had found refuge in Egypt, in a sacred temple where she remained untouched by human breath. Who knows—perhaps we too fight, weep, and kill each other here on earth only for Helen's image. But on the other hand, who knows (the shades in Hades came to life when they drank the blood of a living man)—with all the blood that Helen's shade has drunk over so many thousands of years, will it never be able to come to life again? I wonder. I wonder if the image will not eventually join its flesh, thus enabling us one day to embrace a real, warm body, a true Helen?

Taygetus the fierce warrior and Helen his wife. Inhaling Helen's perfume amidst the oleanders of the Eurotas, I had forgotten myself. I felt ashamed. In order to breathe more virile air I set out one morning to climb Taygetus.

The mountain's cheer, the pine tree's balm, the fiery rocks, the hawks hovering above me, the impregnable solitude—all these fortified my heart. I climbed happily for many hours. Around noontime, however, black clouds gathered overhead. There were muffled thunderclaps. I started back down at a run, feeling the storm approaching behind me. I jumped from stone to stone, raced, competed with it so that it would not overtake me. But suddenly the pines quivered, the world grew dark, and I was belted by lightning flashes. The whirlwind had caught me. Plunging face-downward on the ground so that I would not fall, I closed my eyes and waited. The whole mountain shook; next to me two pines split in half and thundered down the slope. I smelled the sulphur in the air. All at once the torrent let loose. The wind subsided and huge necklaces of water poured out of the sky. The thyme, savory, sage, and mint, battered by the downpour, threw forth their scents; the entire mountain began to steam.