The Colossus of Maroussi (8 page)

Some days intervened before I saw with my own eyes the still, healing splendor of Epidaurus. During that interval I almost lost my life, but of that I will speak in a moment. Our destination was Hydra where Ghika and his wife awaited us. Hydra is almost a bare rock of an island and its population, made up almost exclusively of seamen, is rapidly dwindling. The town, which clusters about the harbor in the form of an amphitheatre, is immaculate. There are only two colors, blue and white, and the white is whitewashed every day, down to the cobblestones in the street. The houses are even more cubistically arranged than at Poros. Aesthetically it is perfect, the very epitome of that flawless anarchy which supersedes, because it includes and goes beyond, all the formal arrangements of the imagination. This purity, this wild and naked perfection of Hydra, is in great part due to the spirit of the men who once dominated the island. For centuries the men of Hydra were bold, buccaneering spirits: the island produced nothing but heroes and emancipators. The least of them was an admiral at heart, if not in fact. To recount the exploits of the men of Hydra would be to write a book about a race of madmen; it would mean writing the word DARING across the firmament in letters of fire.

Hydra is a rock which rises out of the sea like a huge loaf of petrified bread. It is the bread turned to stone which the artist receives as reward for his labors when he first catches sight of the promised land. After the uterine illumination comes the ordeal of rock out of which must be born the spark which is to fire the world. I speak in broad, swift images because to move from place to place in Greece is to become aware of the stirring, fateful drama of the race as it circles from paradise to paradise. Each halt is a stepping stone along a path marked out by the gods. They are stations of rest, of prayer, of meditation, of deed, of sacrifice, of transfiguration. At no point along the way is it marked FINIS. The very rocks, and nowhere on earth has God been so lavish with them as in Greece, are symbols of life eternal. In Greece the rocks are eloquent: men may go dead but the rocks never. At a place like Hydra, for example, one knows that when a man dies he becomes part of his native rock. But this rock is a living rock, a divine wave of energy suspended in time and space, creating a pause of long or short duration in the endless melody. Hydra was entered as a pause in the musical score of creation by an expert calligrapher. It is one of those divine pauses which permit the musician, when he resumes the melody, to go forth again in a totally new direction. At this point one may as well throw the compass away. To move towards creation does one need a compass? Having touched this rock I lost all sense of earthly direction. What happened to me from this point on is in the nature of progression, not direction. There was no longer any goal beyond—I became one with the Path. Each station thenceforth marked a progression into a new spiritual latitude and longitude. Mycenae was not greater than Tiryns nor Epidaurus more beautiful than Mycenae: each was different in a degree for which I had lost the circle of comparison. There is only one analogy I can make to explain the nature of this illuminating voyage which began at Poros and ended at Tripolis perhaps two months later. I must refer the reader to the ascension of Seraphita, as it was glimpsed by her devout followers. It was a voyage into the light. The earth became illuminated by her own inner light. At Mycenae I walked over the incandescent dead; at Epidaurus I felt a stillness so intense that for a fraction of a second I heard the great heart of the world beat and I understood the meaning of pain and sorrow; at Tiryns I stood in the shadow of the Cyclopean man and felt the blaze of that inner eye which has now become a sickly gland; at Argos the whole plain was a fiery mist in which I saw the ghosts of our own American Indians and greeted them in silence. I moved about in a detached way, my feet flooded with the earthly glow. I am at Corinth in a rose light, the sun battling the moon, the earth turning slowly with its fat ruins, wheeling in light like a waterwheel reflected in a still pond. I am at Arachova when the eagle soars from its nest and hangs poised above the boiling cauldron of earth, stunned by the brilliant pattern of colors which dress the heaving abyss. I am at Leonidion at sundown and behind the heavy pall of marsh vapor looms the dark portal of the Inferno where the shades of bats and snakes and lizards come to rest, and perhaps to pray. In each place I open a new vein of experience, a miner digging deeper into the earth, approaching the heart of the star which is not yet extinguished. The light is no longer solar or lunar; it is the starry light of the planet to which man has given life. The earth is alive to its innermost depths; at the center it is a sun in the form of a man crucified. The sun bleeds on its cross in the hidden depths. The sun is man struggling to emerge towards another light. From light to light, from calvary to calvary. The earth song….

I stayed at Hydra a few days during which time I ran up and down thousands of steps, visited the home of several admirals, made votive offerings to the saints who protect the island, said prayers for the dead, the halt and the blind in the little chapel attached to Ghika’s house, played ping pong, drank champagne, cognac,
ouzo
and
rezina
at the Old Curiosity Shop, sat up with a bottle of whiskey talking to Ghika about the monks in Tibet, began the log of the Immaculate Conception which I finished for Seferiades at Delphi—
and
listened to Katsimbalis, to the Ninth Symphony of his travails and transgressions. Madame Hadji-Kyriakos, Ghika’s wife, laid a wonderful table; we rose from the table like wine casks without legs. From the terrace, which was distinctly Oriental in flavor, we could look out on the sea in drunken stupefaction. The house had forty rooms, some of which were buried deep in the earth. The big rooms were like the saloon of an ocean liner; the little rooms were like cool dungeons fitted up by temperamental pirates. The maids were of divine origin and one of them, at least, was descended directly from the Erectheum though she bore the name of a sacred cereal.

One evening, while scaling the broad steps which led to the tip of the island, Katsimbalis began talking of madness. A mist was coming up from the sea and all I could distinguish of him was the huge head which floated above me like the auric egg itself. He was talking of cities, of how he had gotten a mania for Haussmannizing the big cities of the world. He would take the map of London say, or Constantinople, and after the most painstaking study would draw up a new plan of the city, to suit himself. Some cities he rearranged so thoroughly that later he had difficulty finding his way about—I mean in his own imaginative plan. Naturally a great many monuments had to be torn down and new statues, by unheard-of men, erected in their place. While working on Constantinople, for example, he would be seized by a desire to alter Shanghai. By day he would be rebuilding Constantinople and in his sleep he would be remodel-ling Shanghai. It was confusing, to say the least. Having reconstructed one city he would go on to another and then another. There was no letup to it. The walls were papered with the plans for these new cities. Knowing most of these cities by heart he would often revisit them in his dreams; and since he had altered them throughout, even to such a detail as changing the names of the streets, the result was that he would pass sleepless nights trying to extricate himself and, on awakening, had difficulty recovering his own identity. It was a kind of megalomania, he thought, a sort of glorified constructivism which was a pathologic hangover from his Peloponnesian heritage. We developed the subject further at Tiryns when examining the Cyclopean walls, and again at Mycenae, and for the last time at Nauplia, after climbing the 999 steps leading to the top of the fortress. I came to the conclusion that the Peloponnesians were a race of builders whose spiritual development had been arrested at a formative period and who, consequently, had gone on building automatically, like heavy-handed, heavy-footed sleepwalkers. Nobody knows what these people were trying to create in their sleep; we know only that they preferred to work with the most untractable material. Not a single poet emerged from this race of stone builders. They produced some marvelous “assassinators,” legislators and military leaders. When the curtain fell on the scene the house was not only dark but empty. The soil was so saturated with blood that even to-day the crops from the rich plains and valleys are superlatively luxuriant.

When we took the boat for Spetsai Katsimbalis was still talking. The two of us were going on alone. Spetsai was only a few hours away. As I say, Katsimbalis was still talking. As we neared our destination it began to sprinkle a bit. We got into the small boat and were rowed ashore, Katsimbalis remarking that the place looked strange, that perhaps we had pulled in to the opposite side of the island. We got out of the small boat and walked along the quay. Suddenly we were standing in front of a war monument and to my surprise Katsimbalis began to laugh. “I’m crazy,” he said, “this isn’t Spetsai, this is Ermioni—we’re on the mainland.” A gendarme came over and spoke to us. He recommended us to go to the other side of the island and there catch a small boat for Spetsai. There was a rattle-trap of a Ford which served as a bus waiting for us. It already had six passengers in it but we managed to squeeze in anyway. As we started off it began to rain. We went through the town of Kranidion at lightning-like speed, half of the car on the sidewalk and the other half in the gutter; we made a sharp turn and descended the mountainside with the engine shut off. The car was falling apart and the young pig on which our feet were resting was squealing like a flea-bitten lunatic. When we got to the little port of Portochelli the rain was coming down in torrents. We waded through mud ankle-deep to get to the tavern at the waterfront. A typical Mediterranean storm was raging. When we inquired if we could get a small boat the card-players looked at us as if we were crazy. We said—“After the storm blows over.” They shook their heads. “It will last all day,” they said, “and maybe all night.” We watched the storm for an hour or more, bored stiff by the prospect of remaining here all night. Wasn’t there someone, we inquired, who would take a chance when the storm abated a bit? We let it be known that we would pay double or treble the usual tariff. “By the way,” I asked Katsimbalis, “what is the usual price?” He inquired of the barkeeper. “A hundred drachmas,” he said, if we were to pay three hundred drachmas that would be handsome. Three hundred drachmas is about two dollars. “You mean that someone would be foolish enough to risk his life for two dollars?” I asked. “What about
us
?” he answered, and then suddenly I realized that it might be a foolhardy thing to tempt someone to sail us over that sea. We sat down and talked it over. “Are you sure you want to risk it?” Katsimbalis asked. “What about you?” I parried. “We may never make it,” he said, “it’s a gamble. Anyway, it would be a romantic death—
for you
.” And then he started to talk about all the English poets who had been drowned in the Mediterranean. “The hell with it,” I said, “if you’ll come along I’ll risk it. Where’s that guy who was going to take us?” We asked where the fellow had gone to. “He’s gone to take a little nap,” they said, “he didn’t get any sleep all night.” We tried to find another fellow, but there was no one foolish enough to listen to our pleas. “Can you swim?” asked Katsimbalis. The thought of trying to swim in that boiling sea took some of the steam out of me. “Better wait a while,” he added. “No use getting drowned immediately.” An old tar came up to us and tried to dissuade us from going. “Very treacherous weather,” he said. “It may let up for a little while, but not long enough to reach Spetsai. Better stay here overnight. Nobody will take you out in this sea.” Katsimbalis looked at me as though to say—“Did you hear that? these fellows know what they’re talking about.”

A few minutes later the sun came out and with it appeared the fellow who had been taking a nap. We ran out to greet him but he motioned us back with his hand. We stood at the doorway and watched him bail out the boat and hoist the sails. It seemed to take a devil of a time; meanwhile the clouds had gathered again and there came a crack of lightning and a splash of rain. The fellow ducked down into the hatch. We stood and watched the sky some more. It was raining pitchforks again. When it seemed as if all were hopeless suddenly the fellow came up on deck and beckoned to us. The rain had thinned out and the clouds back of us were breaking. “Is it all right to take a chance now?” we asked, none too sure of ourselves. The fellow shrugged his shoulders. “What does he mean by that?” I inquired. To this Katsimbalis also shrugged his shoulders, adding with a malicious smile—“That means that if we’re crazy enough to risk our lives he is too.” We jumped in and stood up forward, holding on to the mast. “Why don’t you go down below?” I said. Katsimbalis didn’t want to go below, it made him seasick. “Well, you’ll get seasick anyway,” I said. “We’re in for it now.” We had already pushed off and were running close to shore. As we got near the open water a violent gust of wind hit us squarely. The Greek left the tiller to pull down the sails. “Look at that,” said Katsimbalis, “these fellows are mad.” We were skirting dangerously close to the rocks by the time the fellow had pulled in the sails. The sea was running high—ahead of us was a seething mass of whitecaps. I began to realize just how mad it was when I saw the huge troughs into which we were plunging with terrifying vertigo.

We looked back instinctively at the helmsman to catch a ray of hope from his countenance, but his expression was impassive. “He’s probably mad,” said Katsimbalis, and with that a wave broke clean over us and drenched us to the skin. The ducking had an exhilarating effect upon us. We were even more exhilarated when we caught sight of a small yacht pulling up on us. It was only a trifle bigger than our own
benzina
and had about the same speed. Side by side, like two sea horses, the little boats tossed and plunged. I would never have believed that a frail boat could weather such a sea. When we slid down to the bottom of a trough the oncoming wave loomed above us like a white-toothed monster waiting to fall on us belly first. The sky was like the back of a mirror, showing a dull molten glow where the sun vainly strove to beat through. Toward the horizon the lightning was zigzagging back and forth. Now the waves began to strike us from all directions. It took all our strength to hold on to the mast with two hands. We could see Spetsai clearly, the buildings looking ghastly, as if they had vomited up their insides. Oddly enough, neither of us had any fear. I didn’t know till afterwards that Katsimbalis had a dread of the sea, being a highlander and not an islander. His face was radiant. Now and then he yelled—“
Homeric
, what?” Good old Katsimbalis! Crazy like all the Greeks. Terrified of the sea he was and yet he had never said a word about it. “We’ll have a good meal,” he yelled, “if we make it.” He had hardly gotten the words out of his mouth when a snarling, whistling spout of water gave us such a clout that I thought we were done for. But the boat was like a cork. Nothing could keel her over or push her down. We looked at each other knowingly, as if to say, “Well, if she weathered that she’ll weather anything.” We became exultant and shouted crazy words of encouragement as if it were a horse we were riding. “Are you all right back there?” Katsimbalis shouted over his shoulder, hardly daring to look back for fear he would find the man overboard. “
Malista
,” came the reply. What a beautiful word for yes, I thought to myself. And then I thought of the first Greek phrase I had learned—“
ligo nero, se para kalo
”…a little water, please. Water, water…it was running out of my eyes and ears, down my neck, into my belly-button, between my toes. “Bad for the rheumatism,” shouted Katsimbalis. “Not too bad,” I yelled, “you’ll have a good appetite.”