The Colossus of Maroussi (22 page)

It was the first time in my life I had so stubbornly refused anybody. I enjoyed the experience. As I was nearing the hotel an oldish-looking man with long hair and a rather large Bohemian hat darted out of a dark alley and, greeting me in perfect English, held out his hand for alms. I instinctively put my hand in my change pocket and fished out a handful of coins, perhaps fifty or sixty drachmas. He took it, bowed respectfully as he removed his flowing hat and, with a candor and a sincerity that were amazing to behold, he informed me in his impeccable English that grateful as he was for the generous gesture it would not be sufficient for his needs. He asked me if it were possible, and he added that he knew it was a great deal to ask of a stranger, to give him two hundred drachmas more, which was the sum he required to pay his hotel bill. He added that even then he would be obliged to go without food. I immediately pulled out my wallet and handed him two hundred and fifty drachmas. It was now his turn to be astounded. He had asked, but apparently he had never dreamed of getting it. The tears came to his eyes. He began a wonderful speech which I cut short by saying that I had to catch up with my friends who had strolled ahead. I left him in the middle of the street with hat in hand, gazing after me as if I were a phantom.

The incident put me in a good mood. “Ask,” said our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, “and it shall be given unto you.”
Ask
, mind you. Not demand, not beg, not wheedle or cajole. Very simple, I thought to myself. Almost too simple. And yet what better way is there?

Now that my departure had become a certainty Katsimbalis was desperately attempting to organize a few last-minute excursions. It was impossible, with the limited time at my disposal, to even think of visiting Mt. Athos or Lesbos, or even Mykonos or Santorini. Delphi yes, perhaps even Delos. Towards lunchtime every day Katsimbalis was at the hotel waiting for me. Lunch lasted usually until five or six in the afternoon after which we would repair to a little wine cellar where we would have a few aperitifs in order to whip up an appetite for dinner. Katsimbalis was now in greater form than ever, though still complaining of arthritis, migraine, bad liver, loss of memory and so on. Wherever we went we were sure to be joined by some of his numerous friends. In this ambiance the discussion developed to fantastic proportions; the newcomer was fitted into the architectural pattern of his talk with the case and dexterity of a mediaeval joiner or mason. We made sea voyages and inland voyages; we traveled down the Nile, crawled through the pyramids on our bellies, rested awhile in Constantinople, made the rounds of the cafés in Smyrna, gambled at the casino in Loutraki and again at Monte Carlo; we lived through the first and second Balkan wars, got back to Paris in time for the armistice, sat up nights with the monks at Mr. Athos, went back stage at the Folies Bergère, strolled through the bazaars of Fez, went crazy with boredom in Salonika, stopped off at Toulouse and Carcassonne, explored the Orinoco, floated down the Mississippi, crossed the Gobi desert, joined the Royal Opera at Sofia, got typhus in Tiflis, put on a weight-lifting act at the Medrano, got drunk in Thebes and came back on motorcycles to play a game of dominoes opposite the Metro station at “Ammonia.”

Finally it was decided that we would go to Delphi, the ancient navel of the world. Pericles Byzantis, who was a friend of Ghika’s, had invited us to spend a few days there at the new pavilion for foreign students which the government was opening up. We pulled up at the museum in Thebes in a beautiful Packard—Ghika, Byzantis and myself. Katsimbalis had decided to go by bus for some reason or other. By some unaccountable logic Thebes looked exactly as I had pictured it to look; the inhabitants too corresponded to the loutish image which I had retained since school days. The guide to the museum was a surly brute who seemed suspicious of every move we made; it was all we could do to induce him to unlock the door. Yet I liked Thebes; it was quite unlike the other Greek towns I had visited. It was about ten in the morning and the air was winey; we seemed to be isolated in the midst of a great space which was dancing with a violet light; we were oriented towards another world.

As we rolled out of the town, snaking over the low hills cropped close and kinky like a negro’s poll, Ghika who was sitting beside the driver turned round to tell me of a strange dream which he had had during the night. It was an extraordinary dream of death and transfiguration in which he had risen up out of his own body and gone out of the world. As he was describing the wondrous wraiths whom he had encountered in the other world I looked beyond his eye to the undulating vistas which were unrolling before us. Again that impression of a vast, all-englobing space encircling us, which I had noted in Thebes, came over me. There was a terrific synchronization of dream and reality, the two worlds merging in a bowl of pure light, and we the voyagers suspended, as it were, over the earthly life. All thought of destination was annihilated; we were purring smoothly over the undulating ground, advancing towards the void of pure sensation, and the dream, which was hallucinating, had suddenly become vivid and unbearably real. It was just as he was describing the strange sensation he had experienced of suddenly discovering his own body lying prone on the bed, of balancing himself gingerly above it so as to slowly descend and fit himself into it again without the loss of an arm or a toe, that out of the corner of my eye I caught the full devastating beauty of the great plain of Thebes which we were approaching and, unable to control myself, I burst into tears. Why had no one prepared me for this? I cried out. I begged the driver to stop a moment in order to devour the scene with one full sweeping glance. We were not yet in the bed of the plain; we were amidst the low mounds and hummocks which had been stunned motionless by the swift messengers of light. We were in the dead center of that soft silence which absorbs even the breathing of the gods. Man had nothing to do with this, nor even nature. In this realm nothing moves nor stirs nor breathes save the finger of mystery; this is the hush that descends upon the world before the coming of a miraculous event. The event itself is not recorded here, only the passing of it, only the violet glow of its wake. This is an invisible corridor of time, a vast, breathless parenthesis which swells like the uterus and having bowelled forth its anguish relapses like a run-down clock. We glide through the long level plain, the first real oasis I have ever glimpsed. How am I to distinguish it from those other irrigated Paradises known to man? Was it more lush, more fertile, did it groan with a heavier weight of produce? Was it a thriving honeycomb of activity? I cannot say that I was made aware of any of these factors. The plain of Thebes was empty, empty of man, empty of visible produce. In the belly of this emptiness there throbbed a rich pulse of blood which was drained off in black furrowed veins. Through the thick pores of the earth the dreams of men long dead still bubbled and burst, their diaphanous filament carried skyward by flocks of startled birds.

To the left of us ran the range leading to Parnassus, grim, silent, hoary with legend. Strange that all the time I was in Paris, all that joy and misery associated with Montparnasse, I never once thought of the place from which the name derives. On the other hand, though no one had ever counselled me to go there, Thebes had been in my mind ever since the day I landed in Athens. By some unaccountable quirk the name Thebes, just as Memphis in Egypt, always brought to life a welter of fantastic memories and when, in the chill morgue of the museum there, I espied that most exquisite stone drawing so like one of Picasso’s illustrations, when I saw the rigid Egyptian-like colossi, I felt as if I were back in some familiar past, back in a world which I had known as a child. Thebes, even after one has visited it, remains in the memory very much like the vague, tremulous reveries which attend a long wait in the antechamber of a dentist’s office. Waiting to have a tooth extracted one often gets involved in the plan of a new book; one fairly seethes with ideas. Then comes the torture, the book is expunged from the consciousness; days pass in which nothing more brilliant is accomplished than sticking the tongue in a little cavity of the gum which seems enormous. Finally that too is forgotten and one is at work again and perhaps the new book is begun, but not as it was feverishly planned back in the cauterized waiting-room. And then, of a night when one tosses fitfully, plagued by swarms of irrelevant thoughts, suddenly the constellation of the lost tooth swims over the horizon and one is in Thebes, the old childhood Thebes from which all the novels have issued, and one sees the plan of the great life’s work finely etched on a tablet of stone—and this is the book one always meant to write but it is forgotten in the morning, and thus Thebes is forgotten and God and the whole meaning of life and one’s own identity and the identities of the past and so one worships Picasso who stayed awake all night and kept his bad tooth. This you know when you pass through Thebes, and it is disquieting, but it is also inspiring and when you are thoroughly inspired you hang yourself by the ankles and wait for the vultures to devour you alive. Then the real Montparnasse life begins, with Diana the huntress in the background and the Sphinx waiting for you at a bend in the road.

We stopped for lunch at Levadia, a sort of Alpine village nestling against a wall of the mountain range. The air was crisp and exhilarating, balmy in the sun and chill as a knife in the shade. The doors of the restaurant were opened wide to suck in the sunlit air. It was a colossal refectory lined with tin like the inside of a biscuit box; the cutlery, the plates, the tabletops were ice cold; we ate with our hats and overcoats on.

From Levadia to Arachova was like a breathless ride on the scenic railway through a tropical Iceland. Seldom a human being, seldom a vehicle; a world growing more and more rarefied, more and more miraculous. Under lowering clouds the scene became immediately ominous and terrifying: only a god could survive the furious onslaught of the elements in this stark Olympian world.

At Arachova Ghika got out to vomit. I stood at the edge of a deep canyon and as I looked down into its depths I saw the shadow of a great eagle wheeling over the void. We were on the very ridge of the mountains, in the midst of a convulsed land which was seemingly still writhing and twisting. The village itself had the bleak, frostbitten look of a community cut off from the outside world by an avalanche. There was the continuous roar of an icy waterfall which, though hidden from the eye, seemed omnipresent. The proximity of the eagles, their shadows mysteriously darkening the ground, added to the chill, bleak sense of desolation. And yet from Arachova to the outer precincts of Delphi the earth presents one continuously sublime, dramatic spectacle. Imagine a bubbling cauldron into which a fearless band of men descend to spread a magic carpet. Imagine this carpet to be composed of the most ingenious patterns and the most variegated hues. Imagine that men have been at this task for several thousand years and that to relax for but a season is to destroy the work of centuries. Imagine that with every groan, sneeze or hiccough which the earth vents the carpet is grievously ripped and tattered. Imagine that the tints and hues which compose this dancing carpet of earth rival in splendor and subtlety the most beautiful stained glass windows of the mediaeval cathedrals. Imagine all this and you have only a glimmering comprehension of a spectacle which is changing hourly, monthly, yearly, millennially. Finally, in a state of dazed, drunken, battered stupefaction you come upon Delphi. It is four in the afternoon, say, and a mist blowing in from the sea has turned the world completely upside down. You are in Mongolia and the faint tinkle of bells from across the gully tells you that a caravan is approaching. The sea has become a mountain lake poised high above the mountaintops where the sun is sputtering out like a rum-soaked omelette. On the fierce glacial wall where the mist lifts for a moment someone has written with lightning speed in an unknown script. To the other side, as if borne along like a cataract, a sea of grass slips over the precipitous slope of a cliff. It has the brilliance of the vernal equinox, a green which grows between the stars in the twinkling of an eye.

Seeing it in this strange twilight mist Delphi seemed even more sublime and awe-inspiring than I had imagined it to be. I actually felt relieved, upon rolling up to the little bluff above the pavilion where we left the car, to find a group of idle village boys shooting dice: it gave a human touch to the scene. From the towering windows of the pavilion, which was built along the solid, generous lines of a mediaeval fortress, I could look across the gulch and, as the mist lifted, a pocket of the sea became visible—just beyond the hidden port of Itea. As soon as we had installed our things we looked for Katsimbalis whom we found at the Apollo Hotel—I believe he was the only guest since the departure of H. G. Wells under whose name I signed my own in the register though I was not stopping at the hotel. He, Wells, had a very fine, small hand, almost womanly, like that of a very modest, unobtrusive person, but then that is so characteristic of English handwriting that there is nothing unusual about it.

By dinnertime it was raining and we decided to eat in a little restaurant by the roadside. The place was as chill as the grave. We had a scanty meal supplemented by liberal portions of wine and cognac. I enjoyed that meal immensely, perhaps because I was in the mood to talk. As so oft en happens, when one has come at last to an impressive spot, the conversation had absolutely nothing to do with the scene. I remember vaguely the expression of astonishment on Ghika’s and Katsimbalis’ faces as I unlimbered at length upon the American scene. I believe it was a description of Kansas that I was giving them; at any rate it was a picture of emptiness and monotony such as to stagger them. When we got back to the bluff behind the pavilion, whence we had to pick our way in the dark, a gale was blowing and the rain was coming down in bucketfuls. It was only a short stretch we had to traverse but it was perilous. Being somewhat lit up I had supreme confidence in my ability to find my way unaided. Now and then a flash of lightning lit up the path which was swimming in mud. In these lurid moments the scene was so harrowingly desolate that I felt as if we were enacting a scene from Macbeth. “Blow wind and crack!” I shouted, gay as a mud-lark, and at that moment I slipped to my knees and would have rolled down a gully had not Katsimbalis caught me by the arm. When I saw the spot next morning I almost fainted.