Report to Grego

  As soon as we finished, she prepared a bed for me on a bench to the right of the table. I lay down, and she lay down on the other bench opposite me. Outside the rain was falling by the bucketful. For a considerable time I heard the water cackle on the roof, mixed with the old lady’s calm, quiet breathing. She must have been tired, for she fell asleep the moment she inclined her head. Little by little, with the rain and the old lady’s rhythmical respiration, I too slipped into sleep. When I awoke, I saw daylight peering through the cracks in the door.

  The old lady had already risen and placed a saucepan on the fire to prepare the morning milk. I looked at her now in the sparse daylight. Shriveled and humped, she could fit into the palm of your hand. Her legs were so swollen that she had to stop at every step and catch her breath. But her eyes, only her large, pitch-black eyes, gleamed with youthful, unaging brilliance. How beautiful she must have been in her youth, I thought to myself, cursing man’s fate, his inevitable deterioration. Sitting down opposite each other again, we drank the milk. Then I rose and slung my carpetbag over my shoulder. I took out my wallet, but the old lady colored deeply.

  “No, no,” she murmured, extending her hand.

  As I looked at her in astonishment, the whole of her bewrinkled face suddenly gleamed.

  “Goodbye, and God bless you,” she said. “May the Lord repay you for the good you’ve done me. Since my husband died I’ve never slept so well.”

  And here is the second memory, the more bitter of the two:

  Toward the beginning of spring I arrived at Assisi, Italy’s most sacred city. Gardens, rooftops, courtyards, the very air—all were filled with the invisible presence of God’s sweet little pauper. It was Sunday. The massive bells of his church were ringing, and the shrill, silver-voiced bells of the Convent of Saint Clare were answering them from the small square opposite. The two of them, Saint Clare and Saint Francis: joined in the air, forever inseparable, with the immortal voices given them by sainthood and death. “Father Francis, when are you finally going to come and see us poor sisters in our convent?” “When the thorns blossom with white flowers . . .” And behold! thorns now blossom everlastingly, and God’s two mated doves, forever inseparable, flap their wings eternally over Assisi.

  I climbed the narrow streets. Doors kept opening, women emerging. Freshly bathed, perfumed with lavender, their hair carefully combed, they were setting out hurriedly, cheerfully, for church—to see and be seen. In springtime in the lands of the sun the church is the Lord’s sitting room; His friends, men and women alike, go there, seat themselves in the rows of chairs, and engage in small talk, at one moment with God, at the next with their neighbors. God’s servant comes and goes, habited in white lace and a black or red dress. He rings the little bell and in a sweet voice chants the praises of Saint Francis, the master of the house. Then the guests rise, say goodbye, and head for the door. They have paid their visit to the Saint; now the visit is over. Heaven laughs with satisfaction, and below on earth the taverns open their doors.

  I had a letter of introduction to Countess Erichetta which would enable me to stay at her palazzo. She had been described to me as an elderly aristocrat who lived all alone with a faithful servant named Ermelinda and who would be extremely delighted to have my company. Once Assisi’s loveliest belle, she had been widowed at the age of twenty-six, and since that time had not known any man. She possessed huge expanses of olive groves and vineyards; formerly she had mounted her mare each morning and gone out to inspect her lands, but now she was old, continually cold, and she simply sat in front of her fire, taciturn and sorrowful, as though regretting her life of chastity. Talk to her, I had been told, look at her as if she were still twenty-six years old, give her a little joy, even if too late.

  It was a mild spring day. The swallows had returned, the fields were filled with small white daisies, the breeze warm and fragrant. But the fire was burning in the great mansion and the old countess was seated in a low armchair in front of it, with a kerchief of blue silk over her white hair. Placing my letter on her knees, she turned to look at me. I was flushed and overheated from my climb, my shirt unbuttoned down the front. My knees—I was wearing short pants—glistened in the fireglow. I was twenty-five years old.

  “Well?” said the countess, smiling at me. “The whole of Greece has suddenly entered my house. Welcome.”

  Ermelinda came—the young “adopted daughter” who eventually would receive a dowry from her mistress. Bringing a tray, she prepared settings on a low table, then arranged the milk, butter, toast, and fruit on it.

  “I’m very happy,” said the countess. “Now I am not alone.”

  “Nor am I,” I answered. “As I sit here, I understand the meaning of nobility, beauty, and kindness.”

  The countess’s pale cheeks flushed, but she said nothing. I saw a flame flash briefly across her eyes. She must surely have thought to herself with anger and complaint, The devil take nobility, beauty and kindness! It’s youth that counts, youth, nothing else!

  She set aside for me an immense room containing a vast bed with a velvet tester. Two large windows gave onto the street; I could see the courtyard of the Convent of Saint Clare opposite us, with the nuns coming and going in silence, white flaps on both sides of their heads. The campanile, roof, and court were full of doves; the entire convent kept sighing amorously, like one huge female dove. “What do the nuns want with all those doves?” the countess asked me one day. “For shame! Don’t they see and hear them; don’t they realize how scandalous it is? They should chase them away, or better still, butcher them and eat them—to be rid of them! To let us be rid of them!”

  I remained in Assisi three months. Saint Francis and Countess Erichetta held me there, not allowing me to leave. Where was I to go? If the goal of life was happiness, why leave? Where could I find a dearer, surer companion than Saint Francis, whom I went to visit each day in his house, or more charming company than the countess, that living Saint Clare? All day long I sauntered through gay Umbria, following the Saint’s tracks through olive grove and vineyard. The entire spring struck me as a Franciscan procession of red, yellow, and snow-white fioretti: Saint Francis with his retinue of flowers, rising once more from the soil of Assisi to greet Brother Sun. And Brother Wind as well and Sister Fire and our cheerful little Brother Water . . . and the countess . . . and the happy Cretan lad at her side.

  Each evening I returned to the house, tired and content. The fire would be burning, the countess waiting with folded arms in her low armchair, dressed and coiffured, her face lightly powdered. Sorrowful and taciturn as always, she sat with closed eyes, but the moment she heard the door and became aware of my footsteps, her eyes opened. She would indicate the armchair next to her and touch my knee with her extended hand.

  “Talk, talk. Open your mouth and do not stop. This is the only joy I have.”

  And I would open my mouth and talk to her about Crete, my parents, the women of our neighborhood, about the Cretan wars of independence, and Prince George when he set foot on Cretan soil . . . The entire island was adorned with myrtles and laurels; the elderly combatants—with their long white beards, their bodies hewn by sword blows—bowed to kiss the Greek prince’s hand; they stumbled over one another; they could not see because their eyes were filled with tears. . . . On other occasions I told her about the Irish girl, about our ascent of Psiloriti, what we did there when we were alone in the little chapel, and our subsequent separation.

  “But why, why?” asked the astonished countess. “Didn’t the poor dear make you happy?”

  “Yes, very happy.”

  “Well then?”

  “But it was precisely because of that, Countess.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “More happiness than a young man needs. I was in danger.”

  “In danger of what?”

  “Of one of these two possibilities: either I would grow accustomed to this happiness, whereupon it would lose its intensity and all its glory, or I would not
grow accustomed to it and would always consider it as great as before, in which case I would be lost completely. I saw a bee drowned in its honey once, and learned my lesson.”

  The countess fell into a prolonged meditation.

  “You’re a man,” she said finally. “You don’t have only this on your mind, you have other things. But as for us women . . .”

  That evening we said nothing else. Both of us gazed into the fire until midnight, in silence.

  Sometimes she sent Ermelinda to ask me, “May the countess come to visit you this afternoon?” I would go out immediately to buy sweets and flowers, then return to wait for her. At the prescribed hour she knocked timidly, hesitatingly on my door. I ran to open it for her and she entered, blushing deeply from shyness, as though she were fifteen years old and going out for the first time with a boy. For a considerable while she remained at a loss, unable to speak at all; then, her eyes glued to the floor, she began to respond to me in monosyllables, with an unsure voice. My heart was torn in two. Just look how shyness and maidenhood come again, how in the true woman they survive, undying, and give her a despairing thrice-bitter resplendence in extreme old age!

  The day I finally had to leave, the countess threw her arms around my neck and made me swear I would come to Assisi again in order to see her.

  “And quickly, quickly.” She tried to laugh but could not, and tears welled up into her eyes. “Quickly, because I may have departed by then.” She never said died, always departed.

  I kept my word. Quite a few years later I received a message from her confessor, Don Dionigi: “Come. The countess is departing.”

  I was in Spain; I dispatched a telegram and set out at once.

  Holding an armful of white roses, I kuocked with trembling hand on the door of her palazzo. Was she alive or dead? Ermelinda opened the door, but I dared not ask her. I gave her the roses.

  “The countess is expecting you,” she said. “She’s in bed; she is unable to walk now.”

  I found her sitting up in her bed. Her hair had been combed, her jewelry put on, a little rouge placed on her pale cheeks, and a pink ribbon tied around her neck to hide the wrinkles. And she had polished her nails, the first time I’d seen her do so. She spread her arms, and I fell into them. Then I sat down at the bedside and looked at her. How beautiful she still was at the age of eighty; what sweetness and anguish in her eyes!

  “I am departing,” she said in a low voice, “I am departing . . .”

  I was about to open my mouth and protest in order to comfort her, but she grasped my hand as though taking leave of me.

  “I am departing . . .” she murmured again.

  Night had fallen. Ermelinda entered to light the lamp, but the countess would not let her.

  I could see the faint glow of her face in the semidarkness; her eyes had become two large holes filled with night. And as the blackness thickened, I sensed that the countess was silently, hopelessly departing.

  A few hours later, toward midnight, she had departed.

  19

  MY FRIEND THE POET. MOUNT ATHOS

  HOW DIFFICULT, how extremely difficult for the soul to sever itself from its body the world: from mountains, seas, cities, people. The soul is an octopus and all these are its tentacles.

  Italy occupied my soul, my soul occupied Italy. We were inseparable now; we had merged into one. No force anywhere on earth is as imperialistic as the human soul. It occupies and is occupied in turn, but it always considers its empire too narrow. Suffocating, it desires to conquer the world in order to breathe freely.

  Such was my first, my virgin voyage to western Europe. Though I did not immediately realize this at the time, within me the provincial frontiers had begun to dissolve. I saw that the world is richer and wider than Greece, and that beauty, suffering, and strength can assume other countenances besides those given them by Crete and Greece. How many times as I gazed at the beautiful bodies in Renaissance paintings, bodies so resplendent with seeming immortality, was I overcome by unbearable sorrow and indignation because all the divine forms which had been the pretext of those paintings had rotted away and returned to dust; because human beauty and glory maintained themselves in the light of the sun but for a flash. The two great wounds had begun to open again inside me. Ever since that first trip, beauty has always left an aftertaste of death on my lips. As a result, my soul was enriched; it found a new source of rebellion. For the unsophisticated soul of youth does not easily tolerate the sight of beauty being reduced to nothing while God stands by and neglects to lift His hand to make it immortal. If I were God, thinks the young man, I would distribute immortality lavishly, never once permitting a beautiful body or valiant soul to die. What kind of God is this who tosses the beautiful and the ugly, the valiant and the cowardly all on the same dunghill, stamps His foot down on them without distinction, and turns them all to mud? Either He is not just or not omnipotent—or else He simply does not understand! . . . The young man, frequently without knowing it, has secretly begun to fashion within himself a God who will not shame his heart.

  When Ernest Renan was once asked if he believed in the immortality of the soul, that cunning old prestidigitator replied, “I see no reason why my grocer should be immortal. Or why I should. But I do see a reason why great souls should not die when they depart the flesh.”

  This was how I returned to Greece—wounded. I was seething with intellectual revolt and spiritual confusion, all as yet disordered and indecisive inside me. I did not know what I was going to do with my life; before anything else I wanted to find an answer, my answer, to the timeless questions, and then after that I would decide what I would become. If I did not begin by discovering what was the grand purpose of life on earth, I said to myself, how would I be able to discover the purpose of my tiny ephemeral life? And if I did not give my life a purpose, how would I be able to engage in action? I was not interested in finding what life’s purpose was objectively—this, I divined, was impossible and futile—but simply what purpose I, of my own free will, could give it in accord with my spiritual and intellectual needs. Whether or not this purpose was the true one did not, at that time, have any great significance for me. The important thing was that I should find (should create) a purpose congruent with my own self, and thus, by following it, reel out my particular desires and abilities to the furthest possible limit. For then at last I would be collaborating harmoniously with the totality of the universe.

  If having these metaphysical concerns in one’s youth is a disease, I was, at that period, gravely ill.

  In Athens there was no one. As for my friends, life’s everyday concerns had wizened their minds and hearts.

  “We have no time to think,” one of them said to me.

  “We have no time to love,” declared another.

  “So you’re interested in the purpose of life, are you?” a third said to me, laughing. “Poor fellow, why worry about it!”

  I was reminded of the answer the peasant gave me when the bird flew over our heads and I was so anxious to discover its name. He had looked at me mockingly. “Poor fellow, why worry about it? It’s no good for eating.”

  A man about town who was with my friend stepped forward with a sarcastic glance and chanted:

  I’ll sing you a song, as daintily as I can,

  To shit, eat, fart, and drink, behold the life of man.

  As for the intellectuals: petty jealousies, petty quarrels, gossip, and arrogance. I had begun to write in order to divert my inner cry and keep myself from bursting. I used to climb up to the great and dangerous literary wasps’ nest at Dexamení Square, sit down in a corner, and listen. I did not gossip, did not frequent taverns, did not play cards—I was insufferable. My first three tragedies were painfully taking on flesh within me. The future verses were still music; they were battling to surpass mere sound and become speech.

  Three great figures—Odysseus, Nicephorus Phocas, and Christ—were toiling inside me to acquire faces, to sever themselves from my entrails and be
liberated so that I could be liberated too. My whole life I was dominated by great heroic figures, perhaps because I read the lives of the saints so passionately when I was a child, yearned to become a saint in my turn, and after that devoted myself with equal passion to books about heroes—conquerors, explorers, Don Quixotes. Whenever a figure chanced to combine heroism with sanctity, then at last I possessed a model human being. Now, since I myself could not become either a saint or a hero, I was attempting by means of writing to find some consolation for my incapacity.

  You are a nanny goat, I frequently told my soul, trying to laugh lest I begin to wail. Yes, a nanny goat, poor old soul. You feel hungry, but instead of drinking wine and eating meat and bread, you take a sheet of white paper, inscribe the words wine, meat, bread on it, and then eat the paper.

  Whereupon, one day a light shone in the darkness. I had taken solitary refuge in Kifissiá, in a little house surrounded by pine trees. I have never been a misanthrope; indeed, I have always loved people (from a distance) and whenever someone came to see me, the Cretan in me awoke and I took a holiday in order to welcome a fellow human being to my house. For a good while I would enjoy myself, listening to him and entering into his thoughts, and if I could help him in any way, I did so joyfully. But as soon as the conversation and contact became too prolonged, I withdrew into myself and longed to be left alone. People sensed I had no need of them, that I was capable of living without their conversation, and this they found impossible to forgive me. There are very few people with whom I could have lived for any length of time without feeling annoyed.

  But one day the light shone. That day, at Kifissiá, I met a young man of my own age whom I loved and respected without interruption, one of the few people I found more agreeable in their presence than in their absence. He was extremely good-looking, and knew it; he was a great lyric poet, and knew it. He had written a long, marvelous poem which I read over and over, finding insatiable delight in its versification, diction, poetic atmosphere, and magical harmony. This poet was of the race of eagles; with the first flap of his wings he reached the pinnacle. Afterwards, when he aspired to write prose as well, I saw that he was truly an eagle, for when he ceased flying and attempted instead to walk upon the ground, he was as heavy and awkward as a walking eagle. The air was his element. He had wings; he did not have a solid, terrestrial mind. He saw far, and dimly. He thought in pictures. Poetic figures, for him, were unshakable logical arguments. When he became embroiled in ratiocination and could not find his way out, either a brilliant image would flash across his mind, or else he would shake with fits of laughter and in this way escape.