Report to Grego (28 page)

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.

H
OW 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.

A
s 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.

But he had great majestic dignity, a rare charm and nobility. When you watched him speak, his blue eyes sparkling ecstatically, or heard him rattle the windows as he recited his poems, you understood what the ancient Greek rhapsodists must have been like, the bards who wandered from palace to palace, crowned with vine leaves or violets, and tamed their still-bestial auditors by means of poetry. Truly, from the very first moment I saw this young man, I felt that he was an honor to the human race.

We became abrupt, immediate friends. So greatly did we differ, we divined at once that each needed the other and that the two of us together would constitute the whole man. I was coarse and
taciturn, with the tough hide of a peasant. Full of questions and metaphysical struggles, I remained undeceived by striking exteriors, for I divined the skull beneath the beautiful face. I was devoid of naïveté, sure of nothing. I had not been born a prince; I was struggling to become one. He was jolly, with a stately grandiloquence, sure of himself, the possessor of noble flesh and the unsophisticated, strength-engendering faith that he was immortal. Certain he had been born a prince, he had no need to suffer or struggle to become one. Nor to yearn for the summit, since—of this he was certain also—he had already attained the summit. He was convinced that he was unique and irreplaceable. He would not condescend to compare himself with any other great artist, dead or alive, and this naïveté gave him vast self-confidence and strength.

Once I told him how the queen bee flies into the air on her marriage day followed by an army of drones who try to catch her. One succeeds—the bridegroom. He couples with her, and all the rest fall to the ground and die.

“All the suitors die contented,” I said to him, “because they all feel the bridegroom's joy at his nuptials—as though all had been united into one.”

But my friend simply burst into thunderous laughter.

“I don't understand what you say at all. The bridegroom has to be me, me and no one else!”

“The spirit is not called
Me
, it is called
All of us
,” I replied with a laugh. And I reminded him of the words of a beloved mystic: “I think I am being crowned, whereas others are the victors.”

Later, when I knew him better, I said to him one day, “The great difference between us, Angelos, is this: you believe you have found salvation, and believing this, you are saved; I believe that salvation does not exist, and believing this, I am saved.”

Lying in ambush deep down inside him, however, was an extremely compelling, extremely tender weakness: he had an absolute need to be loved and admired. If you were able to penetrate his triumphant face and trumpet-voiced self-assurance, you saw a perturbed aristocrat holding out his hand to every passer-by. An old friend of his, a very cynical person, said to me one day, “He plays the sultan, but he is really a sultana.”

Many, out of jealousy or an aversion to the pomposity of his outward life, considered him a play-actor and hypocrite; they
claimed that he believed in nothing, that all his sayings and doings were lies and ostentation, that he was a peacock with his stunning feathers permanently deployed, but that if you plucked him you would find nothing but a common, insignificant hen.