The Colossus of Maroussi (20 page)

When I had climbed to the level of the bluff I saw a narrow path ahead of me leading to the pavilion which has been erected on the site of the ruins for the convenience of the traveler. Suddenly I espied a man standing at the other end of the path. As I approached he began bowing and salaaming. That must be Kyrios Alexandros, I thought.

“God has sent you,” he said, pointing heavenward and smiling at me as if in ecstasy. Graciously he relieved me of my coat and lunch box, informing me rapturously as he trotted along in front of me what a joy it was to see a human being again. “This war,” he said, wringing his hands and piously raising his eyes in mute imploration, “this war…nobody comes here any more. Alexandros is all alone. Phaestos is dead. Phaestos is forgotten.” He stopped to pick a flower which he handed me. He looked at the flower sadly as if commiserating it on the miserable fate of being left to bloom unnoticed. I had stopped to look backward towards the encircling mountains. Alexandros stood at my side. He waited silently and reverently for me to speak. I couldn’t speak. I put my hand on his shoulder and tried to communicate my feelings with moist eyes. Alexandros gave me the look of a faithful dog; he took the hand which I had placed on his shoulder and bending low he kissed it.

“You are a good man,” he said. “God sent you to me, to share my loneliness, Alexandros is very happy, very happy. Come,” and he took me by the hand and led me round to the front of the pavilion. He did it as if he were about to confer on me the greatest gift that man can give to man. “I give you the earth and all the blessings it contains,” said that mute, eloquent look in his eyes. I looked. I said—“God, it’s incredible!” I turned my eyes away. It was too much, too much to try to accept at once.

Alexandros had gone inside for a moment, leaving me to pace slowly back and forth on the piazza of the pavilion surveying the grandeur of the scene. I felt slightly demented, like some of the great monarchs of the past who had devoted their lives to the enhancement of art and culture. I no longer felt the need of enrichment; I had reached the apogee, I wanted to give, to give prodigally and indiscriminately of all I possessed.

Alexandros appeared with a rag, a shoe brush and a big rusty knife; he got down on his knees and began manicuring my shoes. I was not in the least embarrassed. I thought to myself let him do as he likes, it gives him pleasure. I wondered vaguely what I might do myself to make men realize what great happiness lies in store for all of us. I sent out a benediction in every direction—to old and young, to the neglected savages in the forgotten parts of the earth, to wild as well as domesticated animals, to the birds of the air, to creeping things, to trees and plants and flowers, to rocks and lakes and mountains. This is the first day of my life, said I to myself, that I have included everybody and everything on this earth in one thought. I bless the world, every inch of it, every living atom, and it is all alive, breathing like myself, and conscious through and through.

Alexandros brought out a table and spread it. He suggested that I walk about the grounds and inspect the ruins. I listened to him as in a trance. Yes, I suppose I ought to stroll about and take it all in. That’s what one usually does. I descended the broad steps of the levelled palace and glanced here and there automatically. I hadn’t the faintest desire to snoop about examining lintels, urns, pottery, children’s toys, votive cells and such like. Below me, stretching away like an infinite magic carpet, lay the plain of Messara, girdled by a majestic chain of mountain ranges. From this sublime, serene height it has all the appearance of the Garden of Eden. At the very gates of Paradise the descendants of Zeus halted here on their way to eternity to cast a last look earthward and saw with the eyes of innocents that the earth is indeed what they had always dreamed it to be: a place of beauty and joy and peace. In his heart man is angelic; in his heart man is united with the whole world. Phaestos contains all the elements of the heart; it is feminine through and through. Everything that man has achieved would be lost were it not for this final stage of contrition which is here incarnated in the abode of the heavenly queens.

I walked about the grounds, taking in the vista from every angle. I described a circle within the enfolding circle of hills. Above me the great vault, roofless, thrown open to infinity. Monsieur Herriot was right and wrong at the same time. One is nearer to the sky, but one is also farther away than ever from that which lies beyond. To reach the sky is nothing—child’s play—from this supreme earthly mansion, but to reach beyond, to grasp if only for an instant the radiance and the splendor of that luminous realm in which the light of the heavens is but a faint and sickly gleam is impossible. Here the most sublime thoughts are nullified, stopped in their winged flight by an ever-deepening halo whose effulgence stills the very processes of thought. At its best thought is but speculation, a pastime such as the machine enjoys when it sparks. God has thought everything out in advance. We have nothing to solve: it has all been solved for us. We have but to melt, to dissolve, to swim in the solution. We are soluble fish and the world is an aquarium.

Alexandros was beckoning to me. Lunch was ready. I saw that he had set the table for me alone. I insisted that he set a place for himself. I had difficulty persuading him to do so. I had to put my arm around him, point to the sky, sweep the horizon, include everything in one large gesture before I could induce him to consent to share the meal with me. He opened a bottle of black wine, a heady, molten wine that situated us immediately in the center of the universe with a few olives, some ham and cheese. Alexandros was begging me to stay a few days. He got out the guest book to show me when the last visitor had arrived. The last visitor was a drunken American apparently who had thought it a good joke to sign the Duke of Windsor’s name to the register, adding “Oolala, what a night!” I glanced quickly over the signatures and discovered to my astonishment the name of an old friend of mine. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I felt like crossing it out. I asked Alexandros if many Americans came to Phaestos. He said yes and from the glow in his eyes I gathered that they left liberal tips. I gathered that they liked the wine too.

I believe the wine was called
mavrodaphne
. If not it should have been because it is a beautiful black word and describes the wine perfectly. It slips down like molten glass, firing the veins with a heavy red fluid which expands the heart and the mind. One is heavy and light at the same time; one feels as nimble as the antelope and yet powerless to move. The tongue comes unloosed from its mooring, the palate thickens pleasurably, the hands describe thick, loose gestures such as one would love to obtain with a fat, soft pencil. One would like to depict everything in sanguine or Pompeiian red with splashes of charcoal and lamp black. Objects become enlarged and blurred, the colors more true and vivid, as they do for the myopic person when he removes his glasses. But above all it makes the heart glow.

I sat and talked with Alexandros in the deaf and dumb language of the heart. In a few minutes I would have to go. I was not unhappy about it; there are experiences so wonderful, so unique, that the thought of prolonging them seems like the basest form of ingratitude. If I were not to go now then I should stay forever, turn my back on the world, renounce everything.

I took a last stroll about the grounds. The sun had disappeared, the clouds were piling up; the brightly carpeted plain of Messara was streaked with heavy patches of shadow and sulphurous gleams of light under the leaden sky. The mountains drew nearer, became massive and ominous in their changing depths of blue. A moment ago the world had seemed ethereal, dream-like, a shifting, evanescent panorama; suddenly it had gathered substance and weight, the shimmering contours massed themselves in orchestral formation, the eagles swooped out of their eyries and hung in the sky like sultry messengers of the gods.

I said good-bye to Alexandros who was now in tears. I turned hastily and started forward along the narrow path which skirts the edge of the cliff. A few paces and Alexandros was behind me; he had quickly gathered a little bouquet of flowers which he pressed upon me. We saluted again. Alexandros remained there, waving to me as I looked back from time to time. I came to the sharp declivity down which I had to wind and twist to the glen. I took a last look back. Alexandros was still there, a tiny speck now, but still waving his arms. The sky had become more menacing; soon everything would be drowned in one vast downpour. I wondered on the way down when I would see it again, if ever. I felt somewhat saddened to think that no one had been with me to share the stupendous gift; it was almost too much to bestow on one lone mortal. It was for that reason perhaps that I had left with Alexandros a princely gratuity—not out of generosity, as he probably assumed, but out of a feeling of guilt. If no one had been there I should still have left something.

Just as I got into the car it began to rain, lightly at first, then more and more heavily. By the time we reached the badlands the earth was a swirling sheet of water; what had been sun-baked clay, sand, barren soil, waste land, was now a series of floating terraces criss-crossed by tawny, turbulent cascades, by rivers flowing in every direction, racing towards the huge steaming sink charged with sullen deposits of earth, broken branches, boulders, shale, ore, wildflowers, dead insects, lizards, wheelbarrows, ponies, dogs, cats, outhouses, yellow ears of corn, birds’ nests, everything which had not the mind nor the feet nor the roots to resist. On the other side of the mountain, in the same torrential downpour, we passed men and women with umbrellas over their heads seated on diminutive beasts leisurely picking their way down the mountainside. Silent, grave figures moving at a snail’s pace, like determined pilgrims on their way to a holy shrine. The huge twisted sentinels of rock piled one on top of another like the giddy monuments of matchboxes which Picasso keeps on his mantelpiece had become huge gnarled mushrooms dripping with black pigment. In the furious rain their tilted, toppling forms seemed even more dangerous and menacing than before. Now and then a great mesa rose up, a mass of delicately veined rock supporting a tiny white sanctuary with a blue roof. If it were not Crete I could have imagined myself to be in some weird demonic stretch of Mongolia, some forbidden pass guarded by evil spirits which lie in wait for the unsuspecting traveler and drive him mad with their three-legged mustangs and henna-colored corpses that stand like frozen semaphores in the bleak, moonlit night.

Herakleion was almost dry when we arrived. In the lobby of the hotel I found Mr. Tsoutsou waiting for me. It was most urgent, he informed me, to pay a visit to the prefect who had been waiting to see me for the last few days. We went round to his office at once. There was a beggar woman and two ragged urchins outside his door, otherwise the quarters were empty and immaculate. We were ushered into his bureau immediately. The prefect rose from behind a huge, bare desk and came forward briskly to greet us. Nothing had prepared me to meet such a figure as Stavros Tsoussis turned out to be. I doubt if there is another Greek like him in all Greece. Such alertness, such alacrity, such punctilio, such suave, steely politeness, such immaculateness. It was as if he had been constantly groomed and attended during the days and nights that he had been waiting for me to put in an appearance, as if he had rehearsed his lines over and over until he had attained the perfection of reeling them off with a nonchalance that was absolute and terrifying. He was the perfect official, such as one imagines from the cartoons of German officialdom. He was a man of steel through and through, yet bending, compliant, gracious and not in the least officious. The building in which his office was situated was one of those modern cement barracks in which men, papers, rooms and furniture are monotonously the same. Stavros Tsoussis had managed by some undefinable adroitness to transform his bureau, bare though it was, into an alarmingly distinguished tabernacle of red tape. Every gesture of his was fraught with importance; it was as if he had cleared the room of everything which might obstruct his flashing movements, his crisp orders, his terrifically concentrated attention upon the business at hand.

What had he summoned me for? He made that known instantly to Tsoutsou who acted as interpreter. He had asked to see me, immediately upon learning of my arrival, in order first of all to convey his respects to an American author who had graciously deigned to visit such a remote spot as Crete, and secondly to inform me that his limousine, which was waiting outside, was at my disposal should I wish to inspect the island at leisure. Thirdly, he had wished to let me know how deeply he regretted not having been able to reach me sooner because a day or two before he had arranged a banquet in my honor which unfortunately I had evidently not been able to attend. He had wanted me to know what an honor and privilege it was to welcome to his country a representative of such a vast liberty-loving people as the Americans. Greece, he said, would forever be indebted to America, not only for the generous and unselfish aid which she had so spontaneously offered his countrymen in times of anguish, when indeed she seemed to have been deserted by all the civilized nations of Europe, but also because of her unswerving loyalty to those ideals of freedom which were the foundation of her greatness and glory.

It was a magnificent homage and I was for a moment thoroughly overwhelmed. But when he added, almost in the same breath, that he would be pleased to hear what my impressions of Greece were, and particularly Crete, I quickly found my tongue and, turning to Tsoutsou who stood ready to aid me with his own inventive elaborations should I fail, I launched into an equally florid, sweeping testimonial of my love and admiration for his country and his countrymen. I got it out in French because that is the language par excellence for floral wreaths and other decorations. I don’t think I had ever before used the French language with such seeming grace and facility; the words rippled off my tongue like pearls, all beautifully garlanded, entwined, interlaced and enchained with deft usages of the verb which ordinarily drive the Anglo-Saxon crazy.