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  PATRICIA STORACE

  Dinner with Persephone

  A native of Mobile, Alabama, Patricia Storace was educated at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge. She is the author of a book of poems, Heredity, and the winner of a prize for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her essays have appeared frequently in The New York Review of Books and in Condé Nast Traveler. This is her first book of prose.

  FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1997

  Copyright © 1996 by Patricia Storace

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1996.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Cambridge University Press: Excerpt from Folk Poetry of Modern Greece by Roderick Beaton. Copyright © 1980 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. • Hestia Publishers and Booksellers: Excerpts from “Demotiko Tragoubi Tis Xenitias,” translated in this work by Patricia Storace. Copyright © 1990 by Hestia Publishers and Booksellers. Reprinted by permission of Hestia Publishers and Booksellers. • Ludlow Music, Inc.: Excerpt from “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie. TRO Copyright © 1956, renewed 1958, 1970 by Ludlow Music, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Ludlow Music, Inc. • Original Book, Inc : Excerpts from Oneirocritica by Artemidorus, translated by Robert J. White, 1990. Reprinted by permission of Original Books, Inc. • Princeton University Press: Excerpts from “Denial,” “Syngrou Avenue, 1930,” and “The Mood of a Day” from Collected Poems of George Seferis, translated by Keeley Sherrard. Copyright © 1967, 1981 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Storace, Patricia.

  Dinner with Persephone / Patricia Storace.

  p. cm.

  1. Storace, Patricia—Journeys—Greece. 2. Greece—Description and travel. I. Title.

  DF728.S76 1996

  949.5—dc20 96-7650

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76533-8

  Author photograph © Jeffrey Weiner

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.1

  For Mrs. Emily M. Flint

  and in loving memory of

  Mrs. Louise S. Lovett

  Where is love that with one stroke cuts time in two and stuns it?

  —From “The Mood of a Day”

  by George Seferis

  In the different cities of Greece and at the great religious gatherings in that country … in the largest and most populous of the islands, I have patiently listened to old dreams and their consequences.

  —Artemidorus of Daldis

  May we believe in Greece.

  —Serapheim, Archbishop of Athens and All Greece

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  MARBLE GIRLS

  THE BLUE GLASS EYE

  IMMORTALITY

  FLESH AND STONE

  METAMORPHOSIS

  THE LIFE-GIVING WELLSPRING

  THE TRUE LIGHT

  I SEE ELVIS

  A DREAM OF THE VIRGIN

  COLD SHOULDER

  THE SISTER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

  MIRRORS AS BIOGRAPHERS

  THE GODFATHER

  WISHES AS HISTORIANS

  THE PAST AS THE FUTURE

  THE PLANETARKHIS

  LUST FOR A SAINT

  A NYMPH’S TEMPLE

  POLYTECHNIC NIGHT

  How IT ALWAYS IS

  A DREAM OF A BODILESS ONE

  MACEDONIA DAY

  WEDDING

  POMEGRANATES

  HEADS OR TAILS

  THE RULE OF WOMEN

  PREGNANT MEN

  CLEAN MONDAY

  AT COLONUS

  SOUL SATURDAY

  INDEPENDENCE DAY

  THE INVINCIBLE COMMANDER

  CANDLES

  THE BUS TO METAMORPHOSIS

  TWIN PEAKS

  THE DREAM OF LOVE AFTER THE DANCE

  THE UNWRITTEN

  THE DREAM OF NARCISSUS

  THE SLEEPING VIRGIN

  THE MARBLE KING

  THE STATUES DANCING

  Also Available from Vintage

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I thank Lynn Nesbit, for her support of this work. I also owe thanks to the Department of Hellenic Studies of Princeton University, and in particular to Dimitri Gondicas. Affectionate thanks also to Richard Burgi, Robert Lane, Demos Kounidis, Krista Zois, and John and Athina Davis, for evenings of white wine and Cavafy, and much more. My heartfelt thanks and love to my dear friends Sofia Theonas, Zacharias Thrillos, the poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, and the painter Yiannis Zikas; nothing would have been possible without them. I am grateful to Robert J. White for his eloquent translation of the Oneirokritika, from which all the Artemidorus quotations are drawn. Thanks to the painter Peter Devine, for joyful hours spent looking at Greek art; and love and gratitude to Ron, involved in this book in more ways than he knows. A number of people did not want acknowledgment, for reasons of privacy; you know who you are, and you know my gratitude.

  It is an honor and an education to work with the editor Erroll McDonald; the guidance of such a profound literary mind is beyond thanks.

  It is rightfully against the law to remove antiquities from Greek territory; and yet I brought home ancient treasures in the form of Greek words. Thanks to my teachers, Tryphon Tzifis and Dora Papaioannou, without whose patient work I could not have shared in these precious possessions.

  The chapter “Dream of Love After the Dance” includes references and quotations from the books of the archives of P.S. Delta “First Memoir” and “Memoir of 1899” which were published by Hermes Publishing House under the supervision of P.A. Zannas and Alexandros P. Zannas. The quotations have been reprinted with the permission of Alexandros P. Zannas and Asimina Zannas.

  MARBLE GIRLS

  Arkhe tou paramythiou, kalispera sas, is a traditional beginning of a Greek fairy tale. The fairy tale begins, good evening to you.

  I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint. It was a neighborhood of mixed high-rises and a scattering of neoclassical houses, some boarded up while the owners waited to be offered the right price for their inheritance. The neighborhood hardware stores carried, along with screwdrivers and lengths of wire and caulking pastes, icon frames with electric lights in the shape of candles attached, so you wouldn’t have to inconvenience yourself with oil for the perpetual flame. All the neighborhood shops—the laundry, the butcher’s, the vegetable market, the TV and appliances store, the cheap dress shop and the bridal gown shop, the school supplies shop with its large-sized brightly colored picture books of Greek myths and tales of Alexander the Great—were defended by charms against the evil eye suspended over their counters. If you took the evening volta, stroll, that provides most Athenians with their exercise during the punishingly hot times of the year, certain streets gave you glimpses of Mount Hymettus, smudged with darkening violet light, like a drawing someone had started and then decided to cross out with ink.

  The tiny cottage of an apartment I moved into yesterday has already begun to teach me what a different world I have come to, physically, socially, historically. It is no easy matter to find apartments with furniture and k
itchen appliances here. In Greece, the tenant is supposed to supply these things. Until 1983, when the obligatory dowry—the prika—a woman brought to her husband was declared illegal, refrigerators and beds were components of the marriage agreement. And for the most part, unmarried people until fairly recently lived with their parents, and had no need for their own domestic equipment. Even now, when it is common for couples to marry later, and to live together before they do, many people I know from previous visits live in a kind of compromise between independence and family surveillance. Their parents or grandparents built family-only apartment buildings in which each child of adult age is housed on a different floor, along with members of the extended family, who wander in and out of each other’s living rooms, dandling each other’s babies, stirring each other’s pots of stifado, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man Kiki has gone out with three times in the last month.

  The miniature living room of this flat is dominated by a ballroom-sized chandelier, a persistent element of the middle-class Greek idea of grandeur in decoration, probably translated into homes from Orthodox churches, which usually feature monumental gilt chandeliers, their branches supporting a rain of votive offerings. There is also a glass-fronted trinket cabinet, which displays a blue and white Greek flag, some seashells, a souvenir china plate from the island of Paros, and a narghile, or hookah, the Middle Eastern water pipe. In the tiny kitchen, there is the ubiquitous dull white marble sink, and a bottle of Ajax cleanser, which promotes itself here through its claims to whiten marble. Marble is more common than wood in southern Greece, and an apartment building which takes itself at all seriously will have marble floors and steps, at least in the entrance. A narrow balcony runs the length of the two rooms, overlooking the courtyard, dotted with green trees in clay pots, an attempt at a city garden from the tenants of the ground floor. There is a balcony etiquette I will have to master, I realized yesterday, even through my jet lag. I suddenly understood the cliché about airing laundry in public, as the neighbors frankly scrutinized my lingerie and the patterns on my sheets as I hung them out to dry. The balconies are proportioned to the size of the apartment, and across the way, on a substantial balcony, a neighbor is handling her line, pins, and draped laundry with the grace and expertise of Madame Vionnet fitting a mannequin. She looks at me impassively. I know I am affording her an odd spectacle—I have never lost a freezing childhood fear of heights, and to lean out over a fatal drop to dry my laundry gives me a sudden image of the characters in North by Northwest as they scramble over Mount Rushmore with a gunman in pursuit. I have to close my eyes for each garment. A badly positioned dress drips a steady purple rain onto the balcony railing below, and a black lace bra spirals down into the courtyard when a clip pulls loose. The neighbor stares at me, and I leave the field, making a show of not clinging to the walls, disguising the symptoms of hyperventilation.

  Recovering with a cup of coffee inside, I hear a scratching sound from the front room; a handful of leaflets has been thrust under the door. Greek apartments, I discover, are leafleted as thickly as American college dormitory rooms. The local movie theater offers a showing of a film starring Yuppy Goldberg, as she transliterates to Greek, and a school of foreign languages offers me French, English, German, and Italian. It takes no more than a drive from the airport to realize how critical the study of foreign languages is in Greece. One of the most common neighborhood sights is the colorful signs offering the teaching of xenes glosses.

  I remember a drive I took across the United States a few years ago. From one end of the continent to another, I did not see a school for foreign languages. They were there, of course, but to be sought out. Here, though, they are ubiquitous; it is hard to walk more than a city block without seeing schools or posters advertising them, as if foreign languages were some kind of vital substance you needed constantly to replenish, a milk. In Greece, where every enterprise that involves language—publishing, entertainment, journalism, tourism—is dependent on the roughly nine million people who speak Greek, knowing one or more foreign languages is a professional necessity. Businessmen, politicians who deal with European Community officials, doctors who must keep abreast of foreign research, writers who here largely make their living on translations, all need foreign languages in order to survive. There used to be an unanswerable Greek joke phrase, “What says meow-meow on the roof tiles?” the equivalent of “Is the pope Catholic?” But friends tell me that it now has an answer—“A dog who is learning foreign languages.”

  The status of the language affects the country externally, too, influencing how well a country is known, whether the outlines of its history become part of the stock of common knowledge. Browsing in bookstores outside Greece, I have much more easily found works on French or German or Spanish history and biography than on modern Greece. The scarcity probably begins with childhood circumstance; lessons in those other languages were readily available. I wonder how it affects people here to have to add the learning of languages to other everyday necessities, and I wonder how it affects native English speakers to be in possession of the current lingua franca, a status once held by Latin, and before that, by Greek. Being able to rely on the dominance of English may affect English speakers’ ability to approach and imagine other cultures—as if they were rich children, who have inherited such an enormous trust fund that they can choose whether or not to go to work.

  The third leaflet offers a six-volume set of the classics of modern Greek literature. It is promised, as if it were in doubt, that the introductions by prominent Greek scholars will “reveal to us the greatness of the deeds and spirits” of the founders of the modern nation. Pictures of the gilt-edged volumes are set against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century painting, showing romantic warriors wearing the foustanella, the pleated Greek kilt, in repose among the ancient columns of the Parthenon—the classical past defended by the creators of modern Greece. The books are the collected writings of Kolokotronis, Krystallis, Valoritis, Solomos, and Makriyiannis, all men of the nineteenth century, when the Greek nation violently entered history. It occurs to me as I look at the elaborately bound books offered by the leaflet that I have never heard them mentioned in speeches by tour guides I have overheard in museums, or listened to on bus trips. The emphasis is usually on Thucydides, Aristotle, or Sappho; paradoxically, it is the history of modern Greece that seems more distant. The past which can be remembered as well as imagined, the recent past which directly produced the manners, customs, and political situation of the nation we travel to, seems almost too complex to approach.

  Kolokotronis and Makriyiannis were military leaders of the Greek War of Independence of 1821 against the Ottoman Turks—these two soldiers so despised each other that the Greek campaign against the Turks nearly became a civil war as well. The engravings show both men wearing oriental turbans and the highly prized elaborate oriental mustaches. In features, costume, and expression, they could be chieftains from any Near or Middle Eastern country. They could be Afghan. They could be Syrian. They could be Turks. All six of them display the self-consciously stern, imposing jailor’s facial expression that means authority in Greece. Taki, a Greek friend of mine, shook his head once over a picture of Franklin Roosevelt that accompanied a review of a biography, and said irritatedly, “That face. I can never understand that face, that inane smile.” In the Greek vocabulary of the face, smiling does not include the nuance of power that it does in the United States. Roosevelt’s sunny optimistic smile had an air, for Americans, of invincibility, of mastery of both good and bad fortune, because to possess happiness is a kind of authority in America, barely comprehensible to Taki, who saw smiling as a kind of placation, a sign of submission, and in whose native tongue the verb “to laugh” also means “to deceive.” This different language of the face begins at passport control in each country. The Americans smile in their booths with an easy self-assurance that enjoyment cannot threaten; the Greeks scowl theatrically, implacably, since a smile is not considered an impressive facial expressio
n, and a male face is meant above all to impress, not to charm.

  The group of men in conventional nineteenth-century European dress are men of letters. Solomos, whose poem to freedom was set as the national anthem, is considered the national poet. He and General Makriyiannis share a quality that makes them not only eminent personalities in the struggle to found the Greek nation, but symbols of it. Solomos, the bastard son of a Greek maidservant and an Italian count who lived on the Ionian island of Zakinthos, is the symbol of the Greece created out of the embrace of European and Greek cultures. Makriyiannis, who said that Greece and Europe could never learn each other’s dances, and who was instrumental in bringing about the fall of the Bavarian king who had been dispatched to rule over the new nation, is the symbol of the Greece created out of the rejection of Europe. That simultaneous rejection and embrace of Europe shifts and collides still, like tectonic plates, under the surface of the country.

  Makriyiannis and Solomos had another common quality which established them as symbols of modern Greece: their relation to Greek. Solomos, who was educated in Italian and had a child’s imprint of the simple Greek of his mother, had virtually to teach himself Greek in order to write poetry in the language. Makriyiannis was semiliterate, and had to learn to write Greek as an adult in order to record his memoirs. In their rebirth as Greeks, they were seen as proofs of “the Greek miracle,” resurrected. And in this nation, which sees itself as the true birthplace of Christianity, and whose national history is seen as a reenactment of the life of Christ, so that the Greek national holiday is deliberately celebrated on the day of the annunciation of Mary’s pregnancy, resurrection is an idea with an erotic power over the national imagination, invoked, yearned for, caressed, an image as present in pop songs as it is on church walls. Yesterday, riding in a taxi, I caught a line on the radio through the chaos of Athens traffic: “And if you cut me in half, I’ll love twice as much.”