Mnemonic (10 page)

I know that many find the whole Arthur Evans enterprise problematic — a wealthy Victorian amateur archaeologist, he bought the land on which the ruins of Knossos stood and began his excavations in 1900 — and modern archaeological principles are certainly much more sensitive to authenticity and accurate interpretation. Still, beyond the painted pillars and patched frescoes, there was the undeniable sense of deep history. Closing my eyes, I could imagine its busy life — the potters, the metalworkers, those preparing food. The Minoan deities were largely female; the priestesses and goddesses in graphic representation held snakes or animals; their breasts were proudly bared to emphasize fertility, and there were often poppies nearby.

The Museum was wonderful, chock full of glorious, animated Minoan ceramics — octopi wrapped around jugs, flowers (the lilies were particularly lovely), marine life given an airy and naturalistic place of honour. The Minoans were a trading culture that excelled at metalwork, importing copper from Cyprus to alloy with local tin to make bronze tools, implements, and statuary, as well as weapons. I loved the gold jewellery, resplendent with bulls and bees.

But it was the frescoes that impressed me most. Their composition was so harmonious, space organized the way a composer might notate music, main theme embellished beautifully by use of colour and motif. My favourite showed a man stretching out to gather the long stigmas of saffron from crocuses scattered over the surface of the fresco, with long, undulating horizonal bushes containing the activity. (Years later I was startled to read that this particular work had been erroneously restored by Arthur Evans because contemporary forensic methods show that the man was in fact a blue monkey gathering saffron!)
Crocus sativus
could be found all over Crete, and so it was a moment when the past transected perfectly with the present.

Giant amphorae held olive oil and wine, two constants of Mediterranean culture. The plants providing these important resources were evident in the art, on the seal stones so beautifully carved. I saw slender leaves incised into stone, little fruits dangling. Some of the small seals were so worn that all I could see was a cup of wine raised to a mouth.

Later on during my time on Crete, I visited Phaistos, and Hagia Triada. In many ways, I preferred the wilder Phaistos to Knossos. Beautifully situated on a low hill west of the Mesara Plain, it had none of Arthus Evans's fanciful reconstructions. “Phaestos [sic] contains all the elements of the heart,” wrote Henry Miller after his experience there in 1939, describing so beautifully its mythic quality in his great book,
The Colossus of Maroussi
, first published in 1941. He explored the site in the company of its caretaker, Kyrios Alexandros, whose son held the same position as his father had when I came, years after Miller. The son never treated me to Mavrodaphne wine, however, and I remembered Henry Miller's description with envy: “He opened a bottle of black wine, a heady, molten wine that situated us immediately in the centre of the universe with a few olives, some ham and cheese.”
⁵
As a result, he'd felt closer to the sky than ever before, a feeling I also had at Phaistos, where the blue dome met the earth in an expression of physical love.

The palace was itself compact, of a piece, somehow, devoid of the erratic sprawling organization of Knossos, which spread itself over a large chunk of land near Herakleion. It's thought that the villa at Hagia Triada, about three kilometres from Phaistos (two elegant wings flying out from a central courtyard and surrounded by a verdant valley), was a summer residence for the priest-king of Phaistos. And there's also another ancient site, Gortyn, on the plain of Mesara, which is where Zeus took his abducted paramour Europa (some say he took her from Lebanon) and made love to her there under a shady plane tree, impregnating her with triplets — Minos, Rhadamantys, and Sarpedon, all of whom became kings of Minoan palaces.

These stories hung in the air like golden dust. You could believe them or not, but you breathed them in regardless. The profiles of the priestesses from Knossos were evident everywhere; the young women of Crete had those eyes, that lustrous hair, the full lips. And who is to say that the olive groves of Mesara are not descendants of those olives that filled the amphorae with their oil, fuelled the beautiful pottery lamps, that kept the wheels of Minoan commerce running smoothly.

I was so young and earnest, walking the dry earth around the palaces with my notebook, trying to describe it all, trying to draw those elongated eyes, those goddesses, snakes in their fists, the priest-king with his headdress of lilies.

How much am I remembering, how much is dreaming? When I went with Agamemnon in his three-wheeled car to Kokkino Pirgos to pick up something for his mother, we stopped and walked away from the road. Did he carry me to the patch of myrtle or did I walk, alert for snakes? Knowing about them made every sound a danger. I do remember the smell of the myrtle as our bodies crushed the dark leaves under the sun, my back imprinted with a lattice of sticks. There were bees in the white blossoms. I do remember his eyes like almonds, his rough hands, and how I sat on a little terrace at Pirgos while his mother's friend asked questions in rapid Greek, sizing me up, then going into the house where there was the ceremony of water, a spoon, quince jam.

Sometimes he frightened me. He was strong, his arms thick with muscles, and he said — I think he said — “I want to make love to your bottom.” I was unsure because of my imperfect Greek, his cursory English. But he was also funny, patient when I tried to learn a new phrase of Greek, and he was so graceful when he danced with the men who came to his
taverna
after several days at sea on a big boat. On such occasions, he'd spent the day cooking a special meal, and the
taverna
was closed to everyone else. I helped serve the dinner of lamb, cauliflower pie, zucchini blossoms stuffed with rice and dill. There were earthenware jugs of wine decanted from a barrel in the corner of the windowless cellar; I'd never tasted this particular wine — it hadn't ever been decanted in my presence — but one mouthful told me it was remarkable.

After dinner, the men all threw their plates to the floor. Maria and I cleaned up while they drank and musicians arrived to tune up. The lyra players were dressed in black, with bright sashes on their waists and across their heads; their instruments were shapely as pears. Some had hawk-bells on their bows, an ancient rhythmic accompaniment. The dancing was beautiful and wild, the drunker of the celebrants stepping onto the tables and turning, stamping, a few of them falling while the others shouted and clapped. When the musicians took a break, they held their lyras in their arms like beautiful women, stroking the wood with knowing fingers.

Did I love him? From this great distance, I don't think so. But it was exciting to walk with him and to listen to his heart when we lay down in the myrtle. I think of the way Eros involved himself in a game with a young woman, holding his hands out as though to suggest a path into the future while her chiton fell from her, her breast so young and exposed, more than two thousand years ago. I can believe how easily this happened. The boy who commanded her to take him on her back was unknown to her, a winged divinity. How quickly our childhoods recede so that we find ourselves recumbent in wild plants with an almond-eyed man or, braced against the earth, lifting him to heaven.

In those years, I did things I never intended to do. Some mornings I'd wake from a night I couldn't remember, head aching from too much wine. My body hurt and I wasn't sure why. Taking a towel, I'd walk down through sleeping streets to the sea and plunge in, swimming out in the buoyant waves until my arms were sore, turning to look back at a village impossibly beautiful and other in its secrecy. Maria would hold my waist in her hands and measure my hips, telling her son I was made to carry children in my body. I had enough Greek to know what she was saying, especially when she spoke slowly, almost lovingly. Swim farther, I'd tell myself, swim and swim until you reach Africa, then step onto the sand and begin again.

Two children at play.
The one who fails to overturn the stone carries the other, having his eyes blindfolded by the rider, until, if he does not go astray, he reaches the stone, which is called a dioros
. Only now the carrier is a girl. Her burden is a boy. She runs. It's a field of sunlight, ripe grasses under her feet. She tries to reach the
dioros
. She's laughing. And what's that, what is that lightness she feels at her cheek as the boy hoists himself higher? Her shoulders are aching but she runs. This is a game. She runs and her chiton drops from her chest; helped a little, who knows. What's that lightness? A wing.
A wing?
She is carrying the god on her shoulder and suddenly they are alone in a field of myrtle, olives, the dry pods of poppies, pale cyclamen, bitter herbs. Going astray with Eros. It has happened without anyone noticing.

I am writing now from a distance of nearly thirty-five years. A couple of summers ago, I met Joni Mitchell briefly in a local restaurant. We talked a little about Crete. “Where did you live?” she asked. “Not far from you in Matala,” I replied, “in Agia Galini.” Then, “Are you glad you went?” she wondered. And I knew she meant: are you glad you were brave enough, foolish enough — because this was before email and cellphones, when a regular telephone call was too expensive to contemplate, when letters took weeks to arrive at my Poste Restante address — a cardboard box in the Galini post office where once a day I'd search through the letters to see if any had come for me. I felt I was on the very edge of the known world.

“Were we ever that young?” I asked her. We both laughed.

I went to Matala once, with Agamemnon. At least three cafés called themselves the Mermaid, but he assured me that he would take me to the original one and he'd buy me a bottle of wine. There were caves where people lived — not Greeks but a ragtag bunch of Swedes, Germans, a few Americans, some Britons. A woman joined us at our table, and we offered her a glass of wine. She gulped it down appreciatively, then told us that she and her boyfriend were in the process of moving to a new cave. The ones on the upper level were choice, she said, and they'd been there long enough to be able to claim one that others were leaving. She was from San Francisco. Her children were out on the square, selling bracelets they'd made from beads and shells. A thin dog sat with them. They waved to their mother and went back to drawing pictures in the dirt with their toes. I think now of another
ephedrismos
figure, the joy of the two girls at play, and hope that those children in Matala were as happy.