Dinner with Persephone (5 page)

“What does the American girl like to eat?” the Mustache asks on one of his runs to the kitchen. He emerges waving a leg of goat, its fluffy tail still attached. “You like goat, Patricia?” he mocks. “Shall we have a
glendi
with goat’s meat?” His wife has just brought it back from her home island, and she and his fifteen-year-old son laugh. At the table, the company consists of his wife and two children, my friend Leda, a professional tour guide, and her fiancé Theo, an architect, and two other men, a businessman and a cartoonist, a
yeliographos.
Greek makes no distinction between painting, drawing, and writing, so that a painter is a
zographos
, a writer of life,
zoi
, and a cartoonist is a writer of laughter. It is hard to imagine this man making drawings to laugh at, using the implements of his sad, exhausted-looking eyes. He finishes his coffee, on his way home to lunch, and wishes me luck. “Greece is beautiful,” he shrugs, “but the Greeks are not good people. I know and you will find out.”

“Well, Yiorgo,” the businessman diverts him by matching disillusionment to disillusionment, “maybe she will be the only good thing America has ever sent us.” He wears the gold baptismal cross Greek children receive from their godparents when they are christened and a blue glass eye on the same gold chain. The fifteen-year-old boy is obviously worried that I will be shocked by such naked cynicism, and says to me, almost protectively, as if he were telling me to cover my eyes during the scary part of a movie, “You see, our lives are very hard, so it makes us cold people.” His mother has been absorbed during this in the television show, and at especially antic moments, she calls out, “
Panagia mou
, oh my holy Virgin, look at this!” Theo, Leda’s fiancé, puts food on my plate from his, cutting it for me as if I were a child. It begins to seem disturbingly possible to me that the model for tender behavior in Greece is parental—but the model for erotic behavior is violence.

Leda makes me do my party piece, the recitation of a Greek nonsense verse that goes “I pass in front of your door, and you are frying fish. You throw me a meatball. Long live Cyprus!” This brings down the house. I try to imagine what sends them into paroxysms,
and guess that it might have something like the effect of hearing someone with a strong Japanese accent declaim, “The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.”

The Mustache passes by and hands his little girl a beribboned chocolate motorcycle, which earns him a radiant smile; an ad comes on television for the coming broadcast of the summer Olympics in Barcelona, and he shakes his head. “I am surprised the flame got so far,” he says, and I look at him questioningly. “No, you never hear about it, but there are always problems with the flame. Not mechanical problems, political problems. I remember once when the flame had to be taken from the Olympic stadium by helicopter, since the people of Olympia blocked the road to the stadium—and I can tell you we will withhold the flame for the Atlanta games, since Coca-Cola stole them from Athens, where they should be held for the anniversary. But it will not be reported.”

Nineteen ninety-six is the one-hundredth anniversary of the modern Olympics, which were held first in the Kalimarmara, “the beautiful marble” stadium presented to the nation by the Onassis of his day, Averoff, who also donated the country’s first battleship. Those 1896 Olympics were also the site of one of the primary myths of modern Greece, which like all true myths takes some element of politics—a political ambition, perception, or action—and transforms it through story into destiny, a destiny which is seen to be nature, as inevitable as daybreak and nightfall. The plots of modern Greek myth, though, are drawn from real events that are apotheosized, rather than imaginary events that are recreated in the world of reality.

At the 1896 Olympics, in front of an international audience and before members of the royal families of Europe, including the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII of England, a shepherd from the Roumeli region took the gold medal in that most charged of competitions for Greeks, the marathon. There it was—Greece reborn, after four hundred years as a fraction of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, Greece outstripping the world against all odds, and racing
to catch up to the phantom figure of ancient Greece, like a body racing to seize its own errant soul, and this in front of the representatives of western Europe, which Greece held both in contempt and in awe. And by a shepherd, who like the illiterate General Makriyiannis who became the author of a classic, won against expensively trained athletes through his natural excellence alone. That he came from Roumeli, a center of the 1821 insurrection against the Turks, and a kind of equivalent to our redneck country, with Barba (Uncle) Yiorgo substituting for our Bubba, added to the savor of the event. The shepherd, Spiro Louis, appeared in photographs and engravings, while his feat was woven into literature, even appearing as the final scene of a novel by Greece’s first public women’s rights activist and one of its first women writers, Kalliroi Parren.

Many filaments of the modern Greek myths were there: the stunned witness of western Europe, the overcoming of a run of evil luck, the race to rejoin time to a lost eternity, and the mystical belief in Greece’s natural excellence. The story is told to me in a patchwork of vehement voices, with a fury not only at Coca-Cola and the United States and the Olympic Committee, but at me, for not knowing this story, for knowing stories about ancient Marathon but not about the marathon of Spiro Louis. There is not just a bitterness at the loss of economic opportunity, but a prickly sense of being snubbed, of not being allowed the chance to prove something that needs proving. “But we could never have prepared Athens for the Olympics on time,” says the Mustache’s wife, “we don’t have the facilities, we don’t have the public transport, everyone would take the opportunity to strike and we can’t even breathe. How could we expect athletes to perform in this
nefos
?” She is shouted down.

“This Olympics belonged to us; and if the rulers of the planet had recognized what they owe us, we would have solved these problems, and others, too. But we are a small country, and the superpowers decide our destiny for us,” the Mustache says.

“Squashes,” his wife says, “
kolokythia.
Nonsense. Look at how we punish the tourists. At the height of the season, it takes them three
hours to go through passport control after a transatlantic flight and two more hours for a taxi, because all the bus drivers are on strike! We punish them and we pretend it is just happenstance.”

Before a full-scale argument begins, the table finds a new outlet for its aggressions by teaching me to curse in Greek. I am taught to thrust my hand forward, in something like our high-five motion, and to snarl, “Here it is!” This, Leda thinks, is probably from a Byzantine way of wishing death on someone, a gesture of smearing them with ashes, which was a mourning custom, along with tearing the clothes, the hair, and scratching the cheeks.

I am taught to call out “Masturbator,” which is mild unless you add an excruciatingly explicit diagonal pulling motion to it. “And if a neighbor annoys you,” the businessman gestures with relish, “you point between your legs and tell them to write it on your balls.” I don’t see the use of this for myself, but he says, “Then write it on what’s there.”

“Or borrow the baker’s,” Leda suggests, “as I have done on occasion.” The table starts an obscenity party, teaching me these phrases with mischievous delight, as if they were teaching them to a talking parrot. And oddly, I, who blush easily in English, can reel off the worst phrases in Greek with phlegmatic indifference. The blush seems to depend on some encounter between a child self and an adult self which can’t be reproduced in a language you learn as an adult.

The businessman, whose father is from Smyrna, the port in Turkey that was once so associated with its Greek population that the Turks called it “infidel Smyrna,” is telling stories about how his father went to school with Onassis, who was also from Smyrna. A round of whispered teasing follows his mention of Smyrna. “He is a Turk,” the Mustache winks. “Baptized not in holy water, but in yogurt.” The businessman drives the teasing off with a cryptic epigram—“If Greeks are Turks, then many Turks are also Greek; Karaghiozis-Karageuz,” this last being a reference to the beloved shadow puppet figure shared in Turkish and Greek versions of the popular cycles of plays in both countries.

The businessman makes a hobby of a small vineyard, and produces his household wine from the grapes, but he is saying with a worried look that he thinks someone may have “eyed” it, because his sister found her dog there a few days ago, dead of the evil eye. “You see,” he explains to me, “the eyes produce electricity, as does the mouth—the whole body is charged, but especially the eyes and mouth—and the evil eye is a product of a kind of negative magnetism in a person, who may not always be aware of possessing this power. And this negative magnetism makes the victim have an accident or get sick or lose something he treasures. Animals die of it often, since they have fewer defenses.”

“Horses always die of it,” adds the Mustache, “because they never vomit.”

“Many people say it is just
fthonos
,” Leda says, uttering one of the key pieces of Greek vocabulary, a word for a poisonous omnipresent jealousy.
Fthonos
is a word as old as Homer; it used to mean the particular jealousy and malice the gods displayed toward humans that caused them to promise a hero immortality, then snatch it back, or to lead a person into a trap. This divine malice seems now to belong only to mortals in their relations to other mortals.

“
Fthonos
surely has something to do with it,” says the businessman. “We are a strange people—it is a disgrace for us to be the unwilling means for any other Greek’s advancement. This is why we are so patriotic. We love the
patrida
so much—because—we hate each other.” He shakes with cheerful laughter. “You don’t believe me?” he asks. “Look.” And he takes a newspaper from an empty chair pushed away from our table, opening it to the classified ads pages, and points to one. It is an ad from a Kyria Kalliope, offering
kafemandeia
, coffee-cup readings, tarot card readings, and palm readings. “If enemies of yours who are jealous of you have made magic against you, she can tell you their names and can bring luck again to your house.” He points to another, Kyria Agapi, Mrs. Love, whose ad says that she is “dowered by God with the power to protect you from your enemies and to expel the evil eye from operating on you.” She
offers also consultations via phone to Greeks living abroad. I hand him back the paper. “You see?” he says.

“Can you tell me who has the evil eye?” I ask, having long since accepted that I am not being teased.

He touches the blue glass eye he wears as a safeguard around his neck. “It would help if you could always tell, but you can’t. Often people with frowning brows pulled together in the center of the forehead have it—and of course people with blue eyes.”

The fear of the evil eye, I know, is felt throughout the Middle East—there are charms against it in Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Persian—and it is an ancient fear, mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. But the blue glass eye, the possible suggestion that bad luck comes from Europe, intrigues me.

The world of magic so often has its roots in the concrete social world; not so much its polar opposite, but its inseparable familiar—that blue glass eye hanging on the Smyrniote’s neck reminds me of the Gothic minority in fourth-century Byzantium, a half-forgotten example of the mobile nature of racial prejudice. For in fourth-century Byzantine society, the fair-skinned and the blue-eyed were objects of physical disgust and fear, they were household slaves, street sweepers, cannon fodder as mercenaries in the army, people in daily contact with contamination, with refuse and with blood, an exploited population who it was feared would revolt one day and slaughter their masters and commanders. By the sixth century the situation had changed and the Gothic population had been absorbed, but I wonder if the blue glass eye might not have been at one time a charm against having the bad fortune to be a Goth, a charm to keep the bad luck of the blue eye out of your own face.

Perhaps the blue-eyed crusaders who sacked Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, are also concentrated in this charm, but this small unseeing eye may have been first a charm not so much of protection as of projection, that stunning psychological mechanism of the powerful, which is so often the unacknowledged presence in classical Greek tragedy, the real death’s-head at the feast. It is the
means through which the murder of Iphigenia by her father is presented as social necessity, while the murderous response of her mother Clytemnestra is portrayed as a demonic outrage. It is the means by which Oedipus’s crimes against his parents are grossly magnified while the fact that the cycle of tragedy began with his parents’ exposing their baby to die on a hillside is a matter of convention. The blue glass eye holds a reminder that it is not only the victim who is afraid of the murderer, but the murderer who is afraid of the victim. Leda spoke of the evil eye as a result of
fthonos
, but it may be equally a protection against the
fthonos
within as against the
fthonos
without.

“At least there are spells against it,” says the Smyrniote. “My aunt, who by the way is a very skilled reader of coffee cups, if you should ever like to look a bit into the future, has taken it off people sometimes.”

“And priests can too,” says the Mustache’s wife. “There is a prayer against it in the prayer book.”

“In the Orthodox prayer book?” I ask.

“Yes,” says the Mustache’s wife, “I can show you, we have one in the knife drawer of the kitchen.” She brings back a black leather book with a ribbon marker and reads, with comments by the others, “Healer of our souls … we beg you, send away, banish, and drive out every devilish operation … every plot, magic and evil and injury and evil enchantment of the eyes of the evil-doing and malicious people, from your servant.” Church Greek is hard for me—you need dictionaries of New Testament—period Greek to read it—but it seems almost equally hard for them; they stumble and argue over words and have to shruggingly let whole phrases go without the right dictionary to help with the puzzles. But Greek is a strange lawless combination of both continuity and fragmentation. Although it is true that a substantial amount of ancient and modern vocabulary is the same, it is also true that there are nineteenth-century authors whose works need glossaries, even dictionaries. There is an enormous pride in the continuity between
ancient and modern Greek, but there is also another pride, almost a secretive ideal, in the vision of a world in which each Greek author would require a private dictionary to be approached. But in this country of Greek and Turk, ancient and modern, Roman and Byzantine, East and West, Christian and polytheist, the language itself is full of hidden kinships and ambiguities. Christians were once called atheists, in the Greek of late antiquity. “Anathema on the hour that I met you” is one of the bitterest things you can say to an old love. But go far back enough in Greek, and you will find that at one time
anathema
meant simply whatever was dedicated to a god, whether cursed or blessed—it is possible to call the Parthenon itself, begun in 447
B.C.
, an
anathema
of victory over the Persians. There is, it seems, an unwitting blessing even in this violent dismissal.