Atlantis: Three Tales

  Gwenny happened to walk by in her paint-speckled smock. She looked over Robert’s shoulder—and made a sound as though she’d been hit. Recovering herself, she let out a breath: “Pure sex!”

  The six of us—Priscilla and Richard and Kathy and Nicky and Mary—watching or whispering from our own projects, went into mindless, paralyzed silence (except Robert, obliviously at work). If Eric had stepped from springtime, through the door, and into the art room to call out some innocent and astonishing excoriation, it couldn’t have been more shocking. Teachers didn’t say things like that in those years. After another moment, however, we laughed.

  Because Gwenny had always been a very different teacher.

  Robert looked around, gave a sheepish smile.

  Gwenny blinked at him—at us. “Well, it is!” she exclaimed. “Pure sex—that’s just what it is! You may not see it now—but you will, eventually. It’s quite marvelous. Go on!”

  When school let out that afternoon, I went back up to the art room, let myself in, and spent a couple of minutes looking at Robert’s painting, still drying on the wall. Robert—who, while the rest of us had gotten taller, leaner, and stronger, had just gotten bigger and pudgier, and was mad about science fiction and amateur radio, and was still, on any scale I could read, the least sexual of children—had painted a picture in which no single shape, line, or color had retained its identity over an entire brush stroke. Rather it was all process, energy, movement . . . Was that, I wondered, what “pure sex” was? I don’t know whether it was beautiful. If anything, it seemed just a breadth away from a truly troubling ugliness—a quality that no figurative painting could have manifested without having been deformed, distorted, grotesque. Nor was it particularly sexy—to me. But it was powerful. Was “pure sex,” I wondered, something that ought to inhabit a painting (though Gwenny clearly thought it should), since its purity seemed to subvert the very esthetic—of shape, of line, of color—that allowed it to manifest itself in the first place? And how did it relate to the outside edge? Robert’s paint over-spilled all four sides and corners. The edge contained his painting no more than a photograph’s edge contains the whole of the reality around the camera. Arbitrarily, it delimited only a fragment of that roiling energy. Pure sex? And how did the “pure” variety differ from the tentative, frightened, half-hidden (and presumably impure) sort I’d tried to sneak into paint years ago with my borrowed muscle-builder hulking on his borrowed throne in his borrowed, orientalized throne room? With a lot of questions in my mind, I went home.

  I must say it here.

  Something about this account bothers me, because its topic finally lists toward the estheticizing of everything—and that way, as Benjamin first suggested and Sontag more recently reminded us, lies fascism.

  But that’s the way the feeling world was presented, unrectified, to me. For better or for worse, that’s how it became mine. And by now we knew that Gwen lived in Greenwich Village. We knew her acquaintances were de Kooning, Bourgeois, Pollock, Nevelson, Frankenthaler, and Francis . . .

  We also knew she was a committed and serious artist—serious enough that, when the school’s three art teachers (omitting Hugo) had an exhibition in the school lobby, several of our other teachers let it be known they did not like her work.

  For the week of the show, Gwen’s three two-foot-wide, seven-foot-high canvasses hung with the paintings of the others, on the wall behind the maroon rail where, each morning, we marched by the nurse, Miss Hedges, to show our tongues and make sure we were all without stain.

  Diagonally across from where the teachers had put up their paintings, under several arches, were some old wall murals. In blue and pink pastels, their style suggested the WPA: in the foreground, wearing long dresses, with bare feet showing from under their hems, highly stylized women picked up sheaves of wheat, while, in the background, in overalls and workmen’s caps, equally stylized men held aloft wrenches and hammers against a configuration of gears, smokestacks, and clouds. A faded rainbow arched over it all. The murals were, indeed, all shape and line (and ideology; though I couldn’t have read that then). They weren’t much on color, though. And they were simply wiped from the eye by Gwenny’s dynamic fusionings across the lobby.

  Impastoed with massive horizontal strokes (wide enough to make you see her six-inch housepainter’s brush), rectilinear umbers, ochres, greens, and browns overlapped like amazing stairs, up the long surfaces, leading, in layered steps, to some apotheosis very much beyond that sacrosanct, upper, outside edge. Among the ochres and earths, squares of metallic gold recalled the utility of apartment radiators daubed over in winter, but with, as well, a patina of spirituality, like icons—the only objects that might justify such gilding. At once immediate and holy, their compositions were as solid as stone forts, energetic, sensuous, joyful, and vigorous—like the abstract passages in the lower-left-hand corners of Vermeer, as austere as non-figurative Klimt, as rich as Titian or Tiepolo.

  To one side of them hung some impressionistic flowers and a painting of children—was Miss Andrews still at the school that year . . . ? On the other, the high school art teacher had put up his several pictures of geometrically precise and vaguely surreal picket fences.

  “Now that,” said our new, young history teacher—who, as a stab toward tradition, insisted we call her “Mrs.”—“I can relate to, at least a little.” As I stood beside her in my snow suit, not quite ready to go outside, still wet from swimming downstairs, she went on: “I mean—” she bent her head to the side—“that’s obviously taken some skill to paint.”

  I liked their skill, too.

  But for me, Gwen’s was the only art in the show. To see it, you merely had to stand before one of her scalar, desiring towers, letting it pulse and suck and glimmer at you, while its tans, mochas, golds, and strawberries lifted you through the awful ascent of its lapped verticalities. Its sensuous awe, along with the average, uninformed, and uncomprehending disdain that the other teachers used to fight off its troubling intensity (one, in her gray suit, with her handsome gray hair: “I’m afraid I just don’t see them. What in the world are they supposed to be pictures of?” And one other, in heady purple: “They just look dirty, to me. Like what you’d expect from a child playing in mud.” And, as I did and do so often, I remembered Eric, the spring dawn, and the marvel the muck of his language had loosed)—surely that was the most important of Gwen’s formal lessons.

  —Amherst

  October 1988

  CITRE ET TRANS

  I

  . . . all that we have been saying is as much a natural sport of the silence of these nether regions as the fantasy of some rhetorician of the other world who has used us as puppets!

  —Paul Valéry, Eupalinos, or The Architect

  “All Greek men are barbarians!” Heidi jerked the leash.

  Pharaoh’s claws dragged the concrete.

  I laughed, and Pharaoh looked around and up, eyes like little phonograph records.

  “Heidi,” I said, “you just can’t talk about an entire population that way.”

  It was too bright to look at the sky directly—even away from the sun. The harbor was blue, not green. And if I stared into the air anyway, it was as though I were watching the water reflected in some dazzling metal, brighter than, but equally liquid as, the sea.

  “Half a population,” Heidi said. “I like the women. They don’t have any style. But I like them.” She wore her black and white poncho—which, only after I’d been living with her in her Mnisicleou Street room two weeks, I realized was because she thought she was fat.

  “Barbarians—hoi barbami—” I pronounced it the way my classics professor back at City College would have, rather than with what had been the surprising (for me) Italianate endings, despite spelling, of modern Greek: “It’s already a Greek word—the Greeks gave it to us—for people who aren’t Greek, who spoke some other language—ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!—like you and me . . . Germans, Americans—”

  “They also wrote Greek trage
dies.” The green ferry sign’s painted wood was bolted to the two-tiered dock rail. “From the way they behave today, though, I don’t think they still have it.” HYDRA, SPETZA, and AEGINA were painted in white Roman capitals. Below, the same names were printed in smaller upper-/lowercase Greek. Heidi shrugged her broad shoulders as we strolled by.

  Once, when I’d commented on how strong she was, Heidi told me that, six years before, when she was nineteen, she’d been women’s swimming champion of Bavaria. She also told me she’d recently graduated from Munich University with a degree in philosophy and a minor in contemporary Hebrew literature: she’d arranged to study for the year in Tel Aviv, with special papers and letters of introduction. But because she was German Protestant, in Israel they wouldn’t let her off the boat. She’d ended up in Athens. Then, when we’d had some odd argument, tearfully she’d explained—while I showered in the pink tiled stall in the room’s corner—that she suffered from a fatal blood disease, not leukemia, but like it, that left no sign on her muscular, tanned torso, arms, or legs. But that was why she’d left the American artist she’d been living with in Florence to come to Athens in the first place: likely it would kill her within three years.

  That last one kind of threw me. At first. And I wrote my wife about it—who wrote about it in a poem I read later.

  At various times I believed all of Heidi’s assertions. But not all three at once.

  “I don’t know whether to kiss David or never to speak to him again for getting me this job—baby-sitting for the children of rich Greeks is just not that wonderful.”

  “The parents want them to learn German. And French.”

  “And English!” she declared. “Believe me, that’s the important one for them. Are you still mad at John—” who was this English electrical engineer—“for taking that job away from you at the Language Institute?” Heidi’s French, Italian, and English were about perfect; her Greek was better than mine. And one evening I’d sat with her through an hour conversation in Arabic with the students we met at one in the morning in the coffee shop in Omoinoia.

  “I was never mad at him,” I told her. “He thought it was as silly as I did. His Cockney twang is thick enough to drown in, and he can’t say an ‘h’ to save himself. But they wanted ‘a native English speaker’; as far as they were concerned, I was just another American who says ‘Ya’ll come’ or ‘Toidy-toid Street’. John would be the first one to tell you I speak English better than he does.”

  “And you’ve written all those beautiful books in it, too. He said he’d read one.”

  “Did he? English John? He never told me.” We were halfway along the pier.

  “I really don’t know which is worse. Rich Greek children, or that museum stuff I was doing . . .” Suddenly she closed her eyes, stopped, and shuddered. Pharaoh sat and looked up, slathering. “Yes I do. I hate German tourists. I hate them more than anything in the world—with their awful, awful guidebooks. All they do is look at the books. Never at the paintings. I used to be so thankful for the Americans. ‘Well, that’s reeeal perty, Maggie!’ ” Heidi’s attempted drawl on top of the Germanic feathering of her consonants produced an accent that, I knew she knew, belonged to no geography at all. But we both laughed. “Even if they didn’t know what they were looking at, they looked at the paintings. The Germans never did. If I’d been there another week, I was going to play a trick—I swear it. I was going to take my dutiful Germans to the wrong painting, and give them my little talk about an entirely different picture—just to see if any of them noticed. You know: in front of a Fifteenth-century Spanish Assumption of the Virgin, I’d begin, with a perfectly straight face: ‘And here we have a 1930 industrial landscape painted in the socialist realism style that grew up in reaction to Italian Futurismo . . .’ ” She started walking again, as though the humor of her own joke had rather run out. “Rich Greek children it will be.”

  “Heidi,” I said, “I think I’ve spotted a German national trait: you Germans always talk about everybody, even yourselves, in terms of ‘national characteristics’. Well, it got you in trouble in that war we had with you when you and I were kids. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up getting you in trouble again.”

  Heidi took my arm. “It isn’t a German trait, dear. It’s a European trait—and you Americans, who are always fighting so hard against generalizing about anyone, look terribly naive to the rest of us because of it. I’d think you American Negroes especially, with your history of oppression from white people, ought to realize, of all Americans, just how suicidally—no, genocidally, there’s the nasty word—naive that is. If you pretend you can’t know anything about a group, how can you protect yourself from that group—when they’re coming to burn crosses in your yard; or to put you in the boxcars.” She seemed suddenly very unhappy—as if that were just not what she wanted to talk about.

  “Well, I like the Greeks, myself. There’s a generalization. Is that okay for you? Did I ever tell you that story about David and me, when I first got back from the islands? You know how David is, every time he spots a new international: coming over to say hello and have a glass of tea. Then, somehow, he was going to show me where something was, and the two of us ended up walking together down Stadiou Street, him in his jeans and t-shirt, and that blond beard of his. And me, right next to him with my beard.”

  “A cute little beard it is, too.” Heidi leaned over to ruffle my chin fuzz with her knuckles.

  With one arm, I hugged her shoulders. “Cut it out, now. Anyway, I didn’t know how the Greeks felt about beards back then—that the only people who wore them—here—were the Greek orthodox priests—”

  “Yes, I know,” Heidi said. “David’s told me—they all think that bearded foreigners are making fun of their priests, which is why they get so hostile. Frankly I don’t believe it for a minute. Greece is only two days by car away from the rest of the civilized world. And there’ve been foreigners coming through here—with beards—for the last hundred years. If you’d have cut yours off just for that, I’d have been very angry at you. Remember, dear: David is English—and the English love to make up explanations about people they think of as foreigners that are much too simple; and you Americans eat them up. The Greeks are just angry at foreigners, beards or no. And a good deal of that anger is rational—while much of the rest of it isn’t. I’d think you were a lot cleverer if you believed that, rather than some silly over-complicated English anthropological explanation!”

  “Well, that’s why I was going to tell you this story,” I said. “About the Greeks. We were walking down Stadiou Street, see—David and me—when I noticed this Greek couple more or less walking beside us. He was a middle-aged man, in a suit and tie. She was a proper, middle-aged Greek wife, all in black, walking with him. And she was saying to him, in Greek (I could just about follow it), all the while glancing over at us: ‘Look at those dirty foreigners—with their dirty beards. They mess up the city, them with their filthy beards. Somebody should take them to the barber, and make them shave. It’s disgusting the way they come here, with their dirty beards, dirtying up our city!’ Well, even though I knew what she was saying, there was nothing I could do. But suddenly David—who’s been here forever and speaks Greek like a native–looked over and yelled out, ‘Ya, Kyria—ehete to idio, alla ligo pio kato!’ Hey, lady—you have one too, only a little further down! Well, I thought I was going to melt into the sidewalk. Or have a fight. But the man turned to us, with the most astonished look on his face: ‘Ah!” he cried. ‘Alla milete helenika!’ Ah! But you speak Greek! The next thing I knew, he had his arms around David’s and my shoulder, and they took us off to a cafe and bought us brandy till I didn’t think we could stand up, both of them asking us questions, about where we were from and what we were doing here, and how did we like their country. You know ‘barbarian’ isn’t the only word the Greeks gave us. So is ‘hospitality’.”

  “No,” Heidi said. “You never did tell me that story. But I’ve heard you tell it at at least
two parties, when you didn’t think I was listening—for fear I’d be offended. It’s a rather dreadful story, I think. But it’s what I mean—about the Greek women having no style. If someone had yelled that to me in the street, I would have cursed him out till—how might you say it?—his balls hoisted up inside his belly to cower like frightened puppies.” She bent down to rub Pharaoh’s head and under his chin. “Then—” she stood again—“maybe I’d have asked him to go for a brandy. Ah, my poor Pharaoh.”

  Heidi pronounced “Pharaoh” as three syllables—Pha-ra-oh—so that, for the next twenty-five years, I really didn’t know what his name was, even after I saw her write it out in a letter; only then, one day (twenty-five years on), looking at the written word for the Egyptian archon, suddenly I realized what she’d meant to call him. But because we were in Greece, and because in general her faintly accented English was so good, I always thought “Pha-ra-oh” was some declension I didn’t quite catch of pharos—lighthouse.

  “Here in Greece,” she said, “you really do lead a dog’s life—don’t you, dog?” She pulled the black leather leash up short again. The collar buckle was gleaming chrome—from some belt she’d found in the Mon-asteraiki flea market; she’d put it together herself on the black leather line. It was unusual looking and quite handsome. Under the poncho she wore black tights and black shoes, with single white buttons on the front. “I take him for a walk in the city—they run up on the street and kick him! You’ve seen them. Don’t say you haven’t. And he’s so beautiful—” She grinned down at him, slipping into a kind of baby talk—“with his beautiful eyes. It was your beautiful eyes, Pharaoh, that made me take you in in the first place, when you were a puppy and I found you limping about and so sick in the back of that old lot. Ah,” she crooned down at him, “you really are so beautiful!”

  “The Greeks just don’t keep pets here, Heidi. At least not house pets.”