Report to Grego (4 page)

One night I was walking on a high snow-covered mountain with a friend. We had lost our way and been overtaken by darkness. Not a cloud in the sky. The moon hung mute and fully round above us; the snow glistened, pale blue, all the way from the saddle of the mountain, where we found ourselves, down to the plain below. The silence was congealed and disquieting—unbearable. For thousands of eons the moon-washed nights must have been similar, before God likewise found such silence unbearable and took up clay to fashion man.

I preceded my friend by a few paces, my mind enveloped in a strange dizziness. I stumbled like a drunkard as I advanced; it seemed to me that I was walking on the moon, or before man's coming in some age-old uninhabited—but intensely familiar-land. Suddenly, at a turn in the terrain, I spied some tiny lights shining palely in the far distance, near the bottom of a gorge. It must have been a small village whose inhabitants were still awake. At that point an astonishing thing happened to me. I still shudder when I recall it. Halting, I shook my clenched fist at the village and shouted in a furor, “I shall slaughter you all!”

A raucous voice not my own! My entire body began to tremble with fright as soon as I heard this voice. My friend ran up to me and anxiously grasped my arm.

“What's the matter with you?” he asked. “Who are you going to slaughter?”

My knees had given way; suddenly I felt inexpressible fatigue. But seeing my friend in front of me, I came around.

“It wasn't me, it wasn't me,” I whispered. “It was someone else.”

It was someone else. Who? Never had my vitals opened so deeply and revealingly. From that night onward I was at last certain
of what I had divined for years: inside us there is layer upon layer of darkness—raucous voices, hairy hungering beasts. Does nothing die, then? Can nothing die in this world? The primordial hunger, thirst, and tribulation, all the nights and moons before the coming of man, will continue to live and hunger with us, thirst and be tormented with us—as long as we live. I was terror-stricken to hear the fearful burden I carry in my entrails begin to bellow. Would I never be saved? Would my vitals never be cleansed?

Now and then, sporadically, a sweet voice sounds in the very center of my heart: “Have no fears. I shall make laws and establish order. I am God. Have faith.” But all at once comes a heavy growl from my loins, and the sweet voice is silenced: “Stop your boasting! I shall undo your laws, ruin your order, and obliterate you. I am chaos!”

They say that the sun sometimes halts in its course in order to hear a young girl sing. Would it were true! If only necessity, spellbound by a songstress down below on earth, could change its course! If only we, by weeping, laughing, and singing, could create a law able to establish order over chaos! If only the sweet voice within us could cover over the growl!

When I am in my cups, or angry, or when I touch the woman I love, or when injustice is strangling me and I raise my hand in rebellion against God, the devil, or the representatives of God or the devil on earth, I hear these monsters bellowing within me and charging against the trap door in order to smash it, rise again into the light, and take up arms once more. I am the latest and most beloved grandchild, after all; aside from me they have no hope or refuge. Whatever remains for them to avenge, enjoy, or suffer, only through me can they do this. If I perish, they perish with me. When I topple into the grave, an army of hairy monsters and aggrieved men will topple into the grave with me. Perhaps this is why they torment me so and are in such a hurry, perhaps this is why my youth was so impatient, unsubmissive, and wretched.

They killed and were killed without respecting the soul, either their own or others'. They loved life and scorned death with the same extravagant disdain. They ate like ogres, drank like calves, did not soil themselves with women when it was a question of going to war. Their torsos were bare in summer, wrapped in sheepskins in the winter. Summer and winter they smelled like animals in rut.

I feel my great-grandfather still fully alive in my blood; of all of them, he, I believe, lives most vibrantly in my veins. His head was shaven above the forehead, with a long braid behind. He kept company with Algerian pirates and flailed the high seas. They established their hideout on the deserted islands of Grabousa at the western tip of Crete. From there they packed on the black sail and rammed the vessels that passed. Some were sailing toward Mecca with a cargo of Moslem pilgrims, others toward the Holy Sepulcher with a cargo of Christians on their way to become hadjis. Whooping, the pirates threw their grapnels and leaped onto the deck, cleavers in hand. Showing no favor either to Christ or Mohammed, they slaughtered the old men, took the young ones as slaves, keeled over the women, and burrowed into Grabousa again, their mustaches full of blood and female exhalations. At other times they swooped down upon the rich spice-laden caiques which appeared from the east. The old men still remembered hearing it said that the entire island of Crete had once smelled of cinnamon and nutmeg because my ancestor, the man with the braid, had plundered a vessel loaded with spices. Not having any way to dispose of them, he had sent them to all the villages of Crete as gifts for his godsons and goddaughters.

I was deeply stirred when a centenarian Cretan informed me of this incident not so many years ago, for without knowing why, I had always liked to keep a tube of cinnamon and several nutmeg seeds with me on my travels, and also in front of me on my writing desk.

Whenever, by listening to the hidden voices within me, I succeeded in following the blood instead of the mind (which quickly pants and halts), I arrived with mystic certitude at my remotest ancestral beginnings. Afterwards, in time, this mysterious certitude was strengthened by palpable signs from everyday life. Although I thought these signs accidental at first and did not pay attention, I was finally able, by blending the voice of the visible world and my hidden inner voices, to penetrate the primordial darkness beneath the mind, lift up the trap door, and see.

And from the moment I saw, my soul began to solidify. It no longer flowed with constant fluctuation like water; a face began to thicken and congeal now around a luminous core, the face of my soul. Instead of proceeding first to the left, then to the right, along ever-changing roads in order to find what beast I was descended
from, I proceeded with assurance, because I knew my true face and my sole duty: to work this face with as much patience, love, and skill as I could manage. To “work” it? What did that mean? It meant to turn it into flame, and if I had time before death came, to turn this flame into light, so that Charon would find nothing of me to take. For this was my greatest ambition: to leave nothing for death to take—nothing but a few bones.

Helping me more than anything else to reach this certainty was the soil where my paternal ancestors were born and raised. My father's stock derived from a village called Barbári, two hours from Megalo Kastro. When the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus Phocas retook Crete from the Arabs in the tenth century, he penned those Arabs who survived the slaughter in several villages, and these villages were called Barbári. It was in such a village that my paternal ancestors put down their roots. All of them have Arab traits. They are proud, obstinate, tight-lipped, abstemious, anti-social. Their anger or love they store for years within their breasts, never saying a word, and then suddenly the devil straddles them and they explode in a frenzy. The supreme benefit for them is not life but passion. They are neither good nor accommodating; their presence is insufferably oppressive, not because of others, but because of themselves. An inner demon strangles them. Suffocating, they become pirates or stab their arms in a drunken stupor in order to shed blood and find relief. Or else they kill the woman they love, lest they become her slave. Or like me, their marrowless grandson, they toil to alter the dark weight and turn it into spirit. What does this mean: to turn my barbarous ancestors into spirit? It means to obliterate them by subjecting them to the supreme ordeal.

Still other voices have secretly marked the road to my ancestors. My heart bounds with joy whenever I encounter a date tree. You would think it were returning to its homeland, to the arid dust-filled Bedouin village whose one precious ornament is the date tree. And once when I entered the Arabian Desert on camelback and gazed out over the waves of boundless, hopeless sands extending before me—yellow and rose, mauve toward evening, without a trace of a human being—I was carried away by a queer intoxication. My heart cried out like a she-hawk returning to a nest it had abandoned years, thousands of years, before.

Then there was this: Once I lived all alone in an isolated hut near a Greek village, “shepherding winds” as a Byzantine ascetic used to say; in other words, writing poetry. This little cottage was buried among olive trees and pines, and the boundless, deep blue Aegean was visible between the branches far below me. No one passed except Floros, a simple grease-stained shepherd with a blond beard. He came with his sheep every morning, brought me a bottle of milk, eight boiled eggs, and some bread, then left. Seeing me bent over my paper and writing, he always shook his head. “Saints preserve us! What do you want with all that letter-writing, boss? Don't you ever get tired?” This was followed by peals of laughter. One day he passed in a great hurry, so sullen and enraged that he did not even say good morning. “What's wrong, Floros?” I called to him. He brandished his huge fist. “Damn it, boss, leave me alone! I couldn't sleep a wink last night. But didn't you hear it yourself? Where are your ears? Didn't you hear that shepherd on the mountain over there, devil take him! He forgot to tune the bells of his flock! How could I sleep! . . . I'm going!”

“Where to, Floros?”

“To tune them, of course. So I can calm down.”

As I was saying, one day at dinnertime when I went to the cupboard to get the saltcellar for my eggs, a little salt spilled on the dirt floor. My heart stood still. Lying down hastily, I began to pick the salt up grain by grain; whereupon I suddenly realized what I was doing and grew frightened. Why all this chagrin over a little salt fallen on the ground? What value did it have? None.

Afterwards, on the sands, I ferreted out still other markers which would enable me to reach my ancestors if I followed them. These were fire and water.

I always jump up with concern when I spy a fire burning uselessly, for I do not want to see it perish; I always race to turn off a tap when I see it running without a jug to be filled or a person to drink or a garden to be watered.

I experienced all these strange things, but never combined them with clarity in my mind in order to discover their mystic unity. My heart could not bear to see water, fire, or salt being squandered; I exulted each time I saw a date tree; when I entered the desert I did not want to leave—but my mind proceeded no further. This lasted many years. In the dusky workshop within me, however, the concern
apparently kept working away in hiding. All those unexplained happenings were being secretly joined inside me. As they came to stand one next to the other, they began little by little to take on meaning, and one day, abruptly, as I was ambling idly in a large city without thinking of this meaning at all, I found it. Salt, fire, and water were the three all-precious possessions of the desert! Surely, therefore, it must have been some ancestor inside me—a Bedouin—who jumped to his feet and dashed to the rescue when he saw salt, fire, and water perishing.

A gentle rain was falling on that day in the large city. I remember seeing a little girl who had found shelter beneath the canopy of a doorway. She was selling small bouquets of drenched violets. I stopped and looked at her, but my mind—far away, eased now, extremely happy—was vagabonding in the desert.

All this may be fancy and autosuggestion, a romantic yearning for the exotic and remote; all the strange events I have enumerated may not be strange at all, or may not have the meaning I give them. Yes, this is possible. Nevertheless, the influence of this organized, cultivated hoax, of this delusion (if it is a delusion) that twin currents of blood, Greek from my mother and Arab from my father, run in my veins, has been positive and fruitful, giving me strength, joy, and wealth. My struggle to make a synthesis of these two antagonistic impulses has lent purpose and unity to my life. The moment the indeterminate presentiment inside me became certainty, the visible world round about fell into order and my inner and outer lives, finding the double ancestral root, made peace with each other. Thus, many years later, the secret hatred I felt for my father was able, after his death, to turn to love.

M
Y
FATHER
spoke only rarely, never laughed, never engaged in brawls. He simply grated his teeth or clenched his fist at certain times, and if he happened to be holding a hard-shelled almond, rubbed it between his fingers and reduced it to dust. Once when he saw an aga place a packsaddle on a Christian and load him down like a donkey, so completely did his anger overcome him that he charged toward the Turk. He wanted to hurl an insult at him, but his lips had become contorted. Unable to utter a human word, he began to whinny like a horse. I was still a child. I stood there and watched, trembling with fright. And one midday as he was passing through a narrow lane on his way home for dinner, he heard women shrieking and doors being slammed. A huge drunken Turk with drawn yataghan was pursuing Christians. He rushed upon my father the moment he saw him. The heat was torrid, and my father, tired from work, felt in no mood for a brawl. It occurred to him momentarily to turn into another lane and flee—no one was looking. But this would have been shameful. Untying the apron he had on, he wrapped it around his fist, and just as the colossal Turk began to raise the yataghan above his head, he gave him a punch in the belly and sprawled him out on the ground. Stooping, he wrenched the yataghan out of the other's grip and strode homeward. My mother brought him a clean shirt to put on—he was drenched in sweat—and I (I must have been about three years old) sat on the couch and gazed at him. His chest was covered with hair and steaming. As soon as he had changed and cooled off, he threw the yataghan down on the couch next to me. Then he turned to his wife.