Report to Grego (7 page)

Truly, nothing more resembles God's eyes than the eyes of a child; they see the world for the first time, and create it. Before this, the world is chaos. All creatures—animals, trees, men, stones; everything: forms, colors, voices, smells, lightning flashes—flow unexplained in front of the child's eyes (no, not in front of them, inside them), and he cannot fasten them down, cannot establish order. The child's world is made not of clay, to last, but of clouds. A cool breeze blows across his temples and the world condenses, attenuates, vanishes. Chaos must have passed in front of God's eyes in just this way before the Creation.

When I was a child, I became one with sky, insects, sea, wind—whatever I saw or touched. The wind had a breast then; it had hands and caressed me. Sometimes it grew angry and opposed me, did not allow me to walk. Sometimes, I remember, it knocked me down. It plucked the leaves from the grape arbor, ruffled my hair which my mother had combed so carefully, carried off the kerchief from our neighbor Mr. Dimitrós's head, and lifted his wife Penelope's skirts.

The world and I still had not parted. Little by little, however, I drew myself out of its embrace. It stood on one side, I on the other, and the battle began.

As the child sits on his doorstep receiving the world's dense, turbid deluge, one day he suddenly sees. The five senses have grown firm. Each has carved out its own road and taken its share of the world's kingdom. The sense of smell was the very first to grow firm within me, I remember. It was the first to start establishing order over chaos.

Every person had his distinctive odor for me when I was two or three years old. Before raising my eyes to see him, I recognized him by the smell he emitted. My mother smelled one way, my father another; each uncle had his special odor, as did each woman of the neighborhood. When someone took me in his or her arms, it was always because of his smell that I either loved him or began to kick and reject him. In time this power evaporated. The various smells blended; everyone plunged into the same stink of sweat, tobacco, and benzene.

Above all, I distinguished unerringly between the smells of Christian and Turk. A kindly Turkish family lived across the street from us. When the wife paid a visit to our house, the odor she emitted made me nauseous, and I used to break off a twig of basil and smell it, or else stuff an acacia flower into each of my nostrils. But this Turkish lady, Fatome, had a little girl about four years old (I must have been three) who exuded a strange smell neither Turkish nor Greek, which I found very pleasing. Eminé was white and chubby, with palms and soles dyed with cinchona, and hair done up in tiny, tiny braids with a shell or little blue stone hanging from each to ward off the evil eye. She smelled of nutmeg.

I knew the hours when her mother was away from home. I used to go to our street door at those times and watch Eminé sitting on her threshold chewing gum. I signaled her that I was coming over. But her door had three steps which seemed immensely high to me. How could I ever scale them? I sweated, I slaved, and after a struggle mounted the first. Next, a new struggle to climb the second. Stopping for a moment to catch my breath, I raised my eyes to look at her. She sat on the threshold completely indifferent. Instead of offering her hand to help, she just looked at me and waited without budging. She seemed to be saying, If you can
conquer the obstacles, everything will be fine. You'll reach me and we'll play together. If you cannot, turn back! But I conquered them at last after much struggle and reached the threshold where she was sitting. She rose then, took me by the hand, and brought me inside. Her mother was away the entire morning; she hired out as a charwoman. Without losing a moment, we took off our socks, lay down on our backs, and glued our bare soles together. We did not breathe a word. Closing my eyes, I felt Eminé's warmth pass from her soles to mine, then ascend little by little to my knees, belly, breast, and fill me entirely. The delight I experienced was so profound that I thought I would faint. Never in my whole life has a woman given me a more dreadful joy; never have I felt the mystery of the female body's warmth so profoundly. Even now, seventy years later, I close my eyes and feel Eminé's warmth rise from my soles and branch out through my entire body, my entire soul.

Little by little I lost my fear of walking and climbing. Going inside the nearby houses, I played with the children of the neighborhood. The world was growing broader.

When I was five years old, I was taken to some woman vaguely a teacher to learn how to draw i's and koulouria on the slate. This was supposed to train my hand so that I would be able to write the letters of the alphabet when I grew older. She was a simple peasant type, short and fattish, a little humpbacked, with a wart on the right side of her chin. Her name was Madam Areté. She guided my hand (her breath smelled of coffee) and expounded on how I should hold the chalk and govern my fingers.

At first I wanted nothing to do with her. I liked neither her breath nor her hump. But then, though I don't know how, she began to be transformed little by little before my eyes: the wart disappeared, her back straightened, her flabby body grew slim and beautiful, and finally, after a few weeks, she became a slender angel wearing a snow-white tunic and holding an immense bronze trumpet. I must have seen this angel on some icon in the church of Saint Minas. Once again the eyes of childhood had performed their miracle: angel and Madam Teacher had become one.

Years went by. I traveled abroad, then returned again to Crete. I called at my teacher's house. A little old lady was sitting on the doorstep sunning herself. I recognized her by the wart on her chin.
When I approached and made myself known to her, she began to weep with joy. I had brought her some presents: coffee, sugar, and a box of loukoums. I hesitated a moment, ashamed to ask her, but the image of the angel with the trumpet had become so firmly established inside me that I could not restrain myself.

“Madam Areté, did you ever wear a white tunic and hold a large bronze trumpet in your hands?”

“Saints preserve us!” the poor old lady cried out, crossing herself. “Me a white jelab, me a trumpet? God forbid! Me a chanteuse!”

And her eyes began to flow.

All things were magically re-kneaded in my yeasty childhood mind; they were brought beyond the reasonable and very close to madness. But this madness is the grain of salt which keeps good sense from rotting. I lived, spoke, and moved in a fairy tale which I myself created at every moment, carving out paths in it to allow me to pass. I never saw the same thing twice, because I gave it a new face each time and made it unrecognizable. Thus the world's virginity renewed itself at every moment.

Certain fruits, especially, had an inexplicable fascination for me, cherries and figs above all. Not simply the fig itself, the fruit, but the fig leaves and their aroma. I used to close my eyes and smell them, turning pale from dreadful bodily contentment. No, not contentment—agitation, fear, tremor, as though I were entering a dark, dangerous forest.

One day my mother took me with her and we traveled to a secluded beach outside of Megalo Kastro, a place where women went swimming. My brain filled with a vast boiling sea. Protruding from this fiery indigo were bodies, very pale, weak, and strange, so it seemed to me, as though they were ill. They were emitting shrill cries and hurling armfuls of water at one another. I could see most of them only as far as the waist; from the waist down they were in the sea. Below the waist they must be fish, I decided; they must be the mermaids that people talk about. I remembered the fairy tale my grandmother told me about the mermaid who is Alexander the Great's sister. Roaming the seas in search of her brother, she asks all the boats that pass, “Is King Alexander alive?” The skipper leans over the gunwale and shouts, “He's alive, my lady, alive and
flourishing!” Alas if he says the king is dead, for then she beats the sea with her tail, raises a tempest, and' shatters all the boats.

One of these mermaids swimming in front of me rose out of the waves and beckoned. She shouted something at me, but the sea's din was so great that I could not understand her. I had already entered the world of the fairy tale, however, and thinking she was inquiring about her brother, I cried out fearfully, “He's alive, alive and flourishing!” Suddenly all the mermaids shook with laughter. Ashamed, I ran away in a furor. “They were women, damn them, not mermaids,” I murmured, and I sat down on a small stone, completely humiliated, with my back turned to the sea.

I thank God that this refreshing childhood vision still lives inside me in all its fullness of color and sound. This is what keeps my mind untouched by wastage, keeps it from withering and running dry. It is the sacred drop of immortal water which prevents me from dying. When I wish to speak of the sea, woman, or God in my writing, I gaze down into my breast and listen carefully to what the child within me says. He dictates to me; and if it sometimes happens that I come close to these great forces of sea, woman, and God, approach them by means of words and depict them, I owe it to the child who still lives within me. I become a child again to enable myself to view the world always for the first time, with virgin eyes.

B
oth of my parents circulate in my blood, the one fierce, hard, and morose, the other tender, kind, and saintly. I have carried them all my days; neither has died. As long as I live, they too will live inside me and battle in their antithetical ways to govern my thoughts and actions. My lifelong effort is to reconcile them so that the one may give me his strength, the other her tenderness; to make the discord between them, which breaks out incessantly within me, turn to harmony inside their son's heart.

Here is another incredible fact: The presence of my two parents is clearly manifested in my hands. My right hand is very strong, completely lacking in sensitivity, absolutely masculine. My left is excessively, pathologically sensitive. Whenever I recall the breast of a woman I loved, I feel pain and a slight tingling in my left palm. It is almost ready to turn black and blue from the pain, almost ready to manifest an actual wound. When I am alone and
watching a bird soar in the air, I feel the warmth of its belly in my left palm. It was in my hands, and only in my hands, that my parents deserted each other and took separate possession, my father in my right hand and my mother in my left.

Here I must add an event which had a profound influence on my life. It was the first spiritual wound I received. Though I am old now, this wound still has not healed.

I must have been four years old. One of my uncles took me by the hand; apparently we were going to see a neighbor in the little graveyard of Saint Matthew's, which lay inside the city walls.

Springtime: camomile had blanketed the graves, a rose bush in one corner was filled with small Aprilish blossoms. It must have been midday; the sun had warmed the ground, the grass was fragrant. The church door stood open. The priest had put incense in the censer and donned his stole. Crossing the threshold, he set out toward the graves.

“Why is he swinging the censer?” I asked my uncle, deeply inhaling the odor of incense and soil.

It was a warm odor and seemed a trifle sickening to me. It reminded me of the smell in the Turkish bath I had visited with my mother the previous Saturday.

“Why is he swinging the censer?” I demanded once more of my uncle, who continued to proceed in silence between the tombs.

“Keep quiet. You'll see in a minute. Follow me.”

Turning behind the church, we heard conversation. Five or six women dressed in black were standing around a grave. Two men lifted the tombstone, then one of them stepped into the grave and began to dig. We went close and stood by the open pit.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“Disinterring the bones.”

“What bones?”

“You'll see in a minute.”

The priest had placed himself at the head of the grave, where he swung the censer up and down and murmured prayers under his breath. I leaned over the newly dug soil. Mold, putrefaction; I pinched my nostrils. Though I felt sick to my stomach, I did not go away. I waited. Bones? What bones? I kept asking myself, and I waited.

Suddenly the man who was bent over and digging stood up
straight. His torso emerged above the pit. In his hands he held a skull. He cleaned the dirt off it, inserting his finger and pushing the mud out of the eye cavities, then placed it on the lip of the grave, leaned over again, and recommenced his digging.

“What is it?” I asked my uncle, trembling from fright.

“Can't you see? It's a dead person's head. A skull.”

“Whose?”

“Don't you remember her? It's our neighbor Annika's.”

“Annika's!”

I burst into tears and began to howl.

“Annika's! Annika's!” I cried. Throwing myself on the ground, I grabbed all the stones I could find and started to hurl them at the gravedigger.

Wailing and lamenting, I screamed how beautiful she was, how beautiful she smelled! She used to come to our house, place me on her knees and comb my curls with the comb she removed from her hair. She used to tickle me under the arms, and I giggled, I peeped like a bird.

My uncle took me in his arms, carried me off a little ways, and spoke to me angrily. “Why are you crying? What did you expect? She died. We're all going to die.”

But I was thinking of her blond hair, her large eyes, the red lips which used to kiss me. And now . . .

“And her hair,” I shrieked, “her lips, her eyes? . . .”

“Gone, gone. The earth ate them.”

“Why, why? I don't want people to die!”

My uncle shrugged his shoulders. “When you grow up, you'll find out why.”

I never did find out. I grew up, became old, and never did find out.

W
ITH MY EVER-MAGIC EYE
, my buzzing bee- and honey-filled mind, a red woolen cap on my head and sandals with red pompons on my feet, I set out one morning, half delighted, half dismayed. My father held me by the hand; my mother had given me a sprig of basil (I was supposed to gain courage by smelling it) and hung my golden baptismal cross around my neck.