Report to Grego (18 page)

They approached, guffawing. I kept filling the glasses to the brim and we downed them in single gulps, one after the other, without food now. The men looked at me with irritation. We neither talked nor sang, but simply drank down the full glasses and stared at each other, anxious to see who would subdue the rest. Their Cretan self-respect had exploded into flames; these fiercely mustachioed winebibbers were ashamed to be defeated by a beardless youth. Nevertheless, they sank to the floor one by one, while I alone remained sober throughout. So great, apparently, was my pain, it triumphed over wine.

The same thing the next night, and the next and the next. I became renowned throughout Kastro as a drunkard who kept
company each night with the shiftless fishermen and stevedores of the waterfront.

My friends were delighted to see me running downhill. They had long since been unable to stomach the fact that I felt no desire for their company and kept myself shut up in my house reading—or, more recently, went out for solitary walks, a book in my pocket. I did not play with them, or gossip, or go courting. “He'll butt his head against the stars and smash it in a thousand pieces,” they had scoffed, looking upon me with hatred. But now that they saw me drinking and disgracing myself with the barefooted riffraff of Kastro they were delighted. They approached me, perhaps even began to like me, and one Saturday night they brought me by underhanded treachery to the town's best cabaret, the audaciously named “Combatants of '21.” A new act had arrived not long before, a troupe of Romanian and French belles who were driving the respectable burghers out of their minds. Each Saturday evening these prudent homeowners slipped secretly into the forbidden, dimly lighted paradise, seated themselves timidly at the most out-of-the-way tables, glanced in every direction to make sure that none of their acquaintances was looking, then clapped their hands to have a painted and perfumed chanteuse come and sit on their knees. In this way these honorable burghers, poor things, were able for a few moments to forget the fault-finding and bickering which accompany a life of virtue.

My friends brought me to the very center and ordered drinks. Along came a fat, billowy Romanian whose sweaty breasts overflowed her unbuttoned silk bodice, a woman of a certain age who knew every trick of the trade. My companions kept refilling my glass; I drank, I became pleasantly happy. Inhaling the acrid female odor, I felt the he-monkey in me awakening. I seized the singer's slipper, filled it again and again with champagne, and drank.

The next day all of Kastro buzzed with the great scandal: the saint, the sage Solomon with his nose in the air, had—alack! alas!—spent the night carousing in a cabaret, imbibing out of a chanteuse's slipper. The end of the world! One of my uncles, mortified by his nephew's ignominious fall, ran to my father and communicated the news to him. But my father just shrugged his shoulders. “In other words he's a man now, he is beginning to become a
man,” he replied. “All he needs to do is buy the singer a new pair of slippers.”

As for me, I rejoiced inwardly because I was transgressing the law, because I was liberating myself from archimandrites and those bugaboos the Ten Commandments, because I was following the firm, sure steps of my hairy forebear.

I had started on the downgrade and I liked it! It was my final year in the gymnasium. I eyed the archimandrite with hatred as he smiled serenely, entrenched in his virtue. Sure about this life and the next, this sheep regarded us, the wolves, with compassion. This I could not stand. I had to disturb his peace, raise a tempest in his blood, erase that moronic smile which suffused his face. One morning, therefore, I did something very wicked. I sent him a short note: “Your mother is gravely ill. She is dying. Hurry to her so that she may give you her blessing.” I dispatched it, then proceeded nonchalantly to school and waited. That day the archimandrite did not appear in class. Nor the next, nor the third. Five days later he returned, unrecognizable. His face was bloated and disfigured by an eczema which reached to his throat and armpits. He scratched himself continually, turned fiery red, was unable to speak, and left before the bell rang. For three months he remained bedridden. Then one morning he returned to us, no longer swollen. But he was exhausted, and vestiges of scabs still covered his face. He looked at us tenderly. The smile had suffused his entire face once more, and his first words were “Praise the Lord, my children. He prodded the hand which wrote me the note saying that my mother was gravely ill, and thus he gave me the opportunity to pay humanity's tribute in my turn—to suffer.” These words made me wince. Was it therefore so very difficult to triumph over virtue? For a moment I felt like standing up and shouting, Forgive me for I have sinned! But another voice rose immediately within me, a voice full of sarcasm and malice: You are a dog, an archimandrite-dog. You are whipped and you lick the hand that is whipping you. . . . No, what I did was right. I should not repent!

T
he next day I summoned the members of the Friendly Society. Now that our own minds were enlightened, I told them, it was our duty to enlighten the minds of everyone else. This must be the
Friendly Society's great mission. Wherever we traveled, wherever we halted, each of our words and deeds must have a single, sole purpose—to enlighten.

Whereupon, the enlightening commenced. We had finished the gymnasium and were free. My father, who wanted me to enter politics, sent me to a village to sponsor a child in baptism. I took my two friends with me; here was the perfect opportunity for us to enlighten an entire village. When we sat down at table immediately after the baptism, and the festivities started, my bosom friend, working up steam, began to preach to the villagers and enlighten them. And before all else he spoke to them of the origin of man, declaring that our progenitor was the monkey and that we must not be so conceited to believe in our supposed status as privileged beings created by God.

All the while my friend was delivering his oration, the village priest kept gazing at him with protruding eyes. He did not speak. When the enlightening drew to a close, however, he shook his head with compassion and said, “Excuse me, my boy, for staring at you all the time you were speaking. It's possible, as you say, that all men are descended from the monkey. As for yourself, however, forgive me for saying so, but you are a lineal descendant of the ass.”

A shiver ran through my body. I looked at my friend; it was as though I were seeing him for the very first time. With his massive drooping jaw, large cauliflower ears, and peaceful velvety eyes he really did resemble an ass. How had I failed to notice it before? A thread within me snapped. After that day I never sent him another letter and I ceased to envy him.

We endured much in our effort to enlighten mankind on the succeeding days as we roamed through Megalo Kastro or toured the villages. We were called atheists, Freemasons, hirelings. Little by little we began to be hooted and barraged with lemon peels wherever we went, but we held ourselves proudly erect and pressed on through the insults and peels, content in the knowlege that we were witnessing and enduring martyrdom for the sake of Truth. Was this not the way it always happened, we said to one another to console ourselves. What a joy to die for a great idea!

On another occasion the three of us went on an excursion to a market town two hours from Kastro. Famous for its vineyards, this town was spread out at the foot of Yioúchtas, the sacred mountain
where (so it was said) Zeus, the father of gods and men, had been interred. But beneath the stones where he reposed, the dead god had still possessed the strength to refashion the mountain above him, and he had altered the position of the rocks, giving them the shape of a gigantic overturned head. One could plainly distinguish the brow, nose, and the long beard which, composed of ilexes, carobs, and olive trees, extended clear down to the plain.

“Even the gods die,” said my third friend, the one who hoped to become an inventor in order to enrich the Friendly Society.

“The gods die,” I answered, “but divinity is immortal.”

“What do you mean?” asked the others. “We don't understand.”

“I don't understand very well myself,” I answered, laughing. Although I felt that I was right, I was unable to make my thought clear. I fell back on laughter, which has always served as my door of escape in times of danger.

We reached the village. The air smelled of raki and must. The villagers had completed the vintage, placed the must in barrels and extracted the raki from the residuum of skins. Now they were seated in the café or outside on their stone oven-platforms or beneath the poplar trees, drinking raki, playing cards, and relaxing.

Several of them rose to greet us. Placing us at their table, they treated us to three glasses of cherry juice. We struck up a conversation. The three of us had come to an understanding earlier, and little by little we subtly brought the conversation around to the miracles performed by science.

“Can your minds conceive how paper is made and newspapers printed?” we asked. “What a great miracle! A forest is chopped down, the logs are transported to machines that crush them into pulp, and the pulp is turned into paper which goes into the printer's through one door and comes out a newspaper through the other.”

The villagers listened with cocked ears; those at adjacent tables rose and sat down at ours. We're doing fine with them, they're being enlightened, we said to ourselves. But at that point a hulking gallows bird came by with a donkeyload of wood. He stopped to hear what was being said.

“Hey, Dimitrós, where are you taking that wood?” someone called to him.

“To make a newspaper!”

Instantaneously, all the villagers, who until then had restrained themselves out of politeness, doubled over with laughter. The whole village rocked with their guffaws.

“I think we'd better leave,” I whispered to my friends. “I feel the lemon peels coming.”

“Where are you going, boys?” cried the villagers, splitting their sides. “Stay a while and tell us more—we want to laugh.” Then they began to follow behind us, shouting:

“Say, which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“And why does God make tiles stay up without nails?”

“And was wise Solomon a man or a woman? Show your stuff, boys!”

“And why does the spotted goat laugh—can you tell us that?”. . .

But we had taken to our heels.

By this time we had grown weary of enlightening mankind by word of mouth. One day we decided to print a manifesto for the masses, a document in which we would clearly and dispassionately state our goal and prescribe the nature of man's duty. Each of us chipped in his savings. We went to the printer Markoulís, who was also known as Mr. Proletariat because he too issued manifestoes meant to rouse and unite the poor—with the purpose of making them a great force which would elect him to the Boule. We went, therefore, and found him. He was middle-aged, with curly gray hair, spectacles, a broad barrel-chested torso, and tiny little bowed legs. A greasy red kerchief was tied around his neck. Taking our manuscript, he began to declaim it aloud with bombastic exaggeration, and the more he read, the more enthusiastic we became. How excellently it was written, how luminously, with what strength! The three of us craned our necks triumphantly, like young cocks about to crow.

“Well done, boys!” declared Markoulís, folding the manuscript. “Mark my words, one day you'll be elected to the Boule and will save our people. Why not join forces, then? I issue manifestoes too. Shake on it!”

But I resisted. “You care only about the poor,” I said to him. “We care about everyone. Our goal is bigger.”

“But your brains are smaller,” retorted the printer, piqued.
“You think you're going to convert the rich also, do you? To wash a nigger is a waste of soap. Listen to me: the rich man is well set up; he doesn't want to change anything, neither God, country, nor his prosperous life. So knock as much as you like on the deaf man's door. You've got to start with the poor, my young cocks, with those who are not well set up, with the oppressed. Otherwise, go find another printer. I'm known as Mr. Proletariat!”

The three of us withdrew to the door to hold council. In no time we reached a unanimous decision. My friend turned to the printer.

“No, we refuse to accept your proposal. We won't make a single concession. Unlike you, we don't distinguish between rich and poor. All must be enlightened!”

“In that case go to the devil, you little fops!” roared Markoulis, and he hurled the manuscrípt in our faces.

I
WAS
still not entirely satisfied, however. I liked the road I had taken but felt I had to reach its furthest limits. That year an Irish girl had arrived in Kastro. She gave English lessons. The thirst for learning was aflame in me as always; I engaged her to tutor me. I wanted to learn the language and write manifestoes in English in order to enlighten those who lived outside Greece. Why should we let them remain in darkness? So I threw myself heart and soul into English, that strange magical world. What joy when I began to saunter through English lyric poetry with this Irish girl! The language, its vowels and consonants, had become so many warbling birds. I stayed at her house until late at night. We talked about music, read poetry, and the air between us caught fire. As I leaned over her shoulder following the lines of Keats and Byron, I breathed in the warm acrid smell of her armpits, my mind grew turbid, Keats and Byron disappeared, and two uneasy animals remained in the tiny room, one clothed in trousers, the other in a dress.

Now that I had finished the gymnasium, I was preparing to go to Athens to register at the university. Who could tell if I would ever see her again, this blue-eyed, slightly stooped but fluffily plump daughter of an Irish pastor. As our separation approached, I grew increasingly more uneasy. Just as when we view a ripe fig oozing with sweet syrup, and being hungry and thirsty we avidly stretch forth our hand to strip its rind, and as we strip it our mouth waters; so in the same way I cast furtive glances at this ripe Irish girl and stripped her in my imagination—like a fig.