A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis
(As published in Stations #1;
Edited by Karl Young; Fall, 1972)
It must be that a sense of guilt was attached to the
satisfaction in having got so far: there was something
about it that was wrong, that was from the earliest times
forbidden. . . It seemed as though the essence of success
were to have got further than one's father, and as though
to excel one's father were something forbidden.
He asked me to take a picture of him, but I didn't
understand at first and I looked for a camera I didn't
possess when he thrust this small box at me. It was
spring-operated, could be hidden in the palm of the hand,
all you did was look, snap, and the film advanced by
itself.
He stood waiting and I stood facing him. He saw me
hesitate, gestured for me to go ahead. I was still
wondering why I had to take his picture and what he was
doing wearing a cap and brown suit in this heat. Another
group was coming up behind us. I could hear their feet
among the marble chips, a clacking as of stones shifting:
sun the heating element in a vast furnace of air and light:
we on the grates of rock: your head about to burst open,
spill its contents over you and the rocks. . .
I looked, anyway, through the key-hole at him. He had
composed himself against the broken marble. It's not in
the picture, I said, pointing to the structure. He smiled.
It isn't in it, I said. Again he smiled. I put the camera
down. He thought I had already taken one picture, motioned
for me to take another. I haven't, I said. It wasn't
visible. Don't you want it in the picture: you in front,
it in back, looming over you? Is this colored film? (The
stone has a pinkish hue, some would say salmon, from the
iron in the marble, oxidized over the centuries). Still,
he hadn't understood. I stood waiting. I want over to
him. I can't get it in the shot. Why don't you move?
Not it, me. He seemed worried he might be marginal to the
Parthenon. Two flanks of German tourists arched around us.
I moved, finally, got him and the Parthenon, composed the
shot carefully. He stood, took off his cap reverently, did
not smile, assumed a stiff position, was dwarfed now by the
temple so that I could get it in. I could already see the
print, no matter how some commercial outfit treated it: an
immense background of fractured marble columns and this
tiny man in a brown suit, white shirt, top button buttoned,
cap in hand, reverently obscured. I snapped. He waited.
I snapped again. I went up to him with the camera.
You don't have one? He seemed surprised. I noticed he had
some plastic containers in his hand. He told me they were
pre-loaded film packs. His pockets were full of them. I
imagined his suitcases full too. He turned to go. I stood
for a moment, wondering what there was familiar about him.
Then I hurried to rejoin my group, which was gathered in
front of the Erechtheon, while the guide spoke about the
forms of the Caryatides. They reminded me of Modigliani's
carving. My mind began to wander. Nothing that was on the
Acropolis held my attention for very long. I remember
thinking, what a rubbish heap. I could imagine the ghosts
of what might have been my own ancestors, had not the Turks
entered that bloodstream, greatly amused at the touring
parties, comprised mostly of women, streaming over the
ruins to possess themselves of something of the past, but
most of all surprised, as Freud first assumed he was,
because the place really did exist in all its hot
dustiness, it wasn't just a figment of his or the race's
imagination.
It turned out the little man was in my group. He came and
sat next to me on the tour bus, as we were being driven to
the National Archeological Museum. The guide said that we
had avoided the worst heat by going to the Acropolis first.
Speaking a mixture of Greek and American, the little man
started to tell me how he had left Greece when he was nine.
Arriving in America with his pockets virtually empty, he
had worked in restaurants in Boston and New York as a
kitchen boy and then as a waiter. In Jersey City he had
opened his own luncheonette; but he couldn't make a go of
it, he said. His wife was always sick. So he took a job
as a short-order cook in a diner in Plainfield, then his
wife died and he went to live with his daughter and her
family when he retired on Social Security. He told me he
had been saving all his life for this trip. First his
failure had eaten up the money, then his wife's illness.
Now he had enough money from a small insurance policy that
had been his wife's. After seeing all the sights, he
confided, he was going to visit his home village near
Corinth.
We walked between rows of Attic, Mycenaean, Cretan-
Mycenaean, Megalopolitan and Cyprio-Acadian pottery — jars,
urns, vessels, and shards — but he looked neither to the left
or right. I asked him if he would like a photograph of
himself with the great bronze statue of Poseidon that had
been fished out of the Aegean, but he didn't seem
interested. Yet we were all haunted by images of
ourselves, they literally dogged our footsteps. You
arrived at the Olympic Stadium to find a boy waving a photo
of yourself taken on the Acropolis. At the theater of
Dionysios another boy advanced to meet us with an armload
of pictures of ourselves looking dazedly at the columns of
the temple of Apollo, with the Acropolis in the background,
blurred now. Lenses had sought us out at each place,
recorded our presence; the images had been processed at
lightning speed and here they were for ten drachmas. I
found myself confronted by myself looking quizzically at
the rear porch of the Parthenon, a handkerchief applied to
my throat as though wounded by an arrow or dart and
stunned, gazing about in shock to see from which direction
my enemy had drawn a bead on me.
Later that evening I was sitting up naked in bed in my
hotel to see the Acropolis out my window lighted up like a
crèche. I had started to write my father a
letter. I wanted to put down a few more thoughts before
going out to dinner. I felt more alone now and I knew this
would only be accentuated by the strangeness of the city.
All you had to do was catch sight of any two people
together, walking or talking, and you felt very vulnerable.
A French girl, whom I had noticed on the boat from
Brindisi, was also on the tour. On the boat I had assumed
she was unaccompanied; often at the pool I would catch
sight of her in a loose green skirt, white blouse, face cut
by a thin strip of black sunglasses. She glanced at me
occasionally on deck as I sat talking with a Dutch
historian, who claimed to have been a student of Huizinga's
but was unfamiliar with Homo Ludens. The cruise wore
on. The girl didn't have the same sitting at dinner, so I
would walk the decks among the dripping bodies of French
and Swedish high school girls and boys who clustered about
the pool trying to find her. She was small and dark and
compactly made. Like myself, she seemed to be a university
student on holiday. I spotted an interesting looking novel
by Butor under her arm. Since docking at Piraeus she had
slipped my mind, but there she was again, across from me,
two or three seats up the aisle on the way to the theater
of Dionisios. There was a moment in which I could have got
up to speak. She had seemed to recognize me, but when I
tried to think of things to say in French only Italian
words came and I became reticent to get up. She turned her
face slightly in my direction, then the bus started up and
the little man came over to me to sit down in that way
people begin to frequent each other at first shyly, then
gradually less so, having already some foothold, a few
words previously exchanged, a shred of habit now. Without
my knowing it the girl had got off. As I was looking out of
the window in downtown Athens, I was surprised to see her
walking by herself, slowly, to a cross walk. Then she was
swept into a crowd, green skirt swaying as her back and
legs did, and my heart sank. I turned to find the little
man making his way to the exit too.
I had begun to tell my father that I was finally in Athens,
although I'd had a sense of Greece even in Brindisi, when I
went into a restaurant and tasted in the sauce on my roast
lamb the mint, oil and lemon. And the perfume of singed
oregano was all about the dining room. I got that far,
half on paper, half in my head, and then I began to think
of that girl now lost, as they say a beautiful secret
square in Venice can be, forever, after you leave it,
passing into a labyrinth or streets and rios and side
canals. . .
There were things I wanted to say to my father. I was about
to travel in the country he himself hadn't seen since he
was nine years old. I described exactly where I had gone
that morning and what I had seen; but I left out the girl
and the little Greek man with the camera. When I got
through two closely written — let me say scribbled — pages, I
found I hadn't said anything essential. And in leaving out
the girl and the man I had falsified the account. I
crumbled up the two airmail sheets and dropped them in the
straw basket under the night table. I went out. I went, in
my mind, out searching for that girl.
I never resumed my letter. Yet there was a pressure to do
so. I knew I would not be seeing my father for at least
another year; and I felt that if I didn't get my thoughts
down immediately I'd lose them and maybe even my father
before I could tell him. All of this proved to be
groundless, but it was real at the time.
I met the little man again at Olympia. He had just been
photographed by a woman, who was handing his camera back to
him, as they stood in a kind of cellar or dug out place set
round with stones that was described as having been the
workshop of Praxiteles. We accompanied each other down
through the tunnel-like entrance to the stadium itself, and
we stood together while my group was being walked around in
the burning heat. I had already soaked through my shirt;
but the little man retained his brown suit jacket and
constantly renewed white shirt, buttoned to the throat.
His cap sat squarely on his head.
It turned out he was having lunch at our hotel. We were
placed at a large table smelling of fresh linen along with
some German women, one of whom I had previously exchanged a
few words with on matters of archaeology. She took it up
again in English. She disapproved of the guide's
orientation to the ruins. It was French archaeology — Marxist
at that! — she said disdainfully. The mind hovered over the
actual creating a rhetorical superstructure; the stones
disappeared. German scholarship had broken the ground, so
to speak, she said, there was no need for la dialectique
perpetuelle, only for description.
As she talked I recalled the Dutch historian I had met on
the boat. I kept looking at her face and then sneaking a
look generally at her. Then I would let my eye go out of
focus. It sounded as though they were one and the same.
It wasn't the quality or even the tonality of the voice so
much as the structure of the ideas, the syntax, aggressive,
propulsive. . . It was as though I were trying to drop off
to sleep and some noise kept making me jump. The other
German women looked on approvingly, although I don't
believe they understood, and sipped their beer. The little
man scanned our faces, smiled as if he understood, and
continued his very frugal lunch of a couple of cold
dolmathes and a piece of bread. He took no wine.
The Germans asked if they could smoke, and I looked at the
ruins below us among the cypresses. The hottest part of the
day was upon us, I could smell my own flesh, feel the skin
about my testicles creep with the heat and the sweat. I
felt as though I were sitting in a fetid puddle. The
Germans were speaking their own language now; the little
man excused himself to go to sleep.
I wandered down to the bus to ask our guide about departure
time. Helen, whose eyes were partitioned by thick, blue-
rimmed American-style glasses, started complaining to me
that no one seemed interested in Olympia. They weren't
asking any questions. It was probably the heat, I told her.
She said usually Germans were more talkative — not as
much as Americans, but they asked more intelligent
questions. The Americans, she offered (again I felt this
incredible lassitude come over me, I leaned against the
cool side of the bus), cared only to verify their previous
ideas of places and things, to have anecdotes they had
heard or been told by their friends and their friend's
friends, who had taken the same tours and had, in turn,
recommended them, re-told. It seemed to give them a sense
of a continuum, she said. The world was one big place where
you and your friends were always at home. And your presence
at any place — Delphi, the Acropolis, St. Peter's — merely
allowed you to check off another entry on a list.
Why go anywhere? I asked.
For status," she answered. To show your friends that you
have the money to spend and the time in which to spend it.
Also, to show yourself to the world, to let yourself be
seen in your conspicuous prosperity, your smug superiority,
your capitalist ascendancy. The worst offenders of all, she
said, are the Greek-Americans, the ones who were born here.
What do they know of Greece? They left here before they
could read and write — most never learned anyway. They tell
you they come back to see the glories of the fatherland.
That's a lie. They come to lord it over the ones who didn't
go, who stayed here. They no longer speak Greek — my English
is better than theirs. The only language they know is
money!
I'm curious, I said. How do you fit me into this?
Helen was undaunted:
You're an intellectual!
How do you know that?
I heard you talking Lessing with that German woman.
The group regathered slowly. On the way to Tripolis Helen
confided to me that she was coming to America in the fall
to visit relatives in New York and to do graduate work,
hopefully at Columbia.
In archaeology? I asked.
Of course not, she frowned.Chemistry.
With Tripolis next, the whole journey became problematic,
for after that we would pass through Sparta on the way to
Mistra, and on that road lay my father's village. I had
been advised at the tour office in Athens that I could
leave my bus in Sparta, remain as long as I wished in that
vicinity, and rejoin another tour coming through to
complete that and my return trip to Athens, thus, according
to the girl behind the desk, getting my money's worth. But
the closer we seemed to get to Sparta, the colder my feet
got. As yet I couldn't put my finger on the precise reason
for my reluctance to stop there. I had a few remaining
relatives, but nothing had been arranged beforehand.
Certainly it would have pleased my father enormously had I
gone to Vroulia and located his family's house and farm,
taken a turn about the grape arbors and olive groves he had
described so often to me. I might even have found an
ancient villager, who would recall the little boy, who,
wearing his mother's shoes, set out one day in 1908 to join
his father in the cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts.
Years before, my father had told me about Vroulia and the
family farm with the same loving accuracy he would describe
Market and Suffolk streets in Lowell, or Endicott Street in
Boston. His was an accuracy born, I suppose, of having
lived in furnished rooms in those streets and of having
sold newspapers and shined the shoes of nameless
"gentlemen" along them. It must have come also of having
to puzzle out the names inscribed on their corner posts and
the signs of their shops by day, while at night in his room
he taught himself the language with the help of Webster's
New International Dictionary, which we still possessed,
rebound, of course, and lying open upon my desk in my
bedroom in Gloucester.
My father stayed less than a year at the mill, where he was
paid a dollar eighty-five a week to sweep floors and empty
spittoons. Leaving his own father, who had died of
consumption, his lungs packed with textile fibers, before
they were even reunited, in an unmarked grave in the Lowell
Municipal Cemetery, he moved to Boston in 1909 and set
himself up in business. To my knowledge he never worked
for another man again. . .
It was of my father's stories that I thought, as I looked
at the Peloponnesus from the window of the bus. Yet,
contrary to Helen, I do not believe I went in search of
verification of those images of Greece my father had given
me, as though I'd never believed or delighted in his
stories of growing up on the farm in Vroulia, or sleeping
on the sugar bags in the back room of his uncle's shop in
Sparta. No, I would take issue with Helen on that point.
But as the trip wore on I lost interest. I didn't feed on
dialexis in those days.
We arrived in Tripolis in the middle of a searing
afternoon. I was faint with the heat, my piles ached from
having sat so long on the bus. In the room I was conducted
to by a boy were two huge brass-posted beds. I chose the
one nearer the window, closed the shutters to leave the
room in darkness at least, and went out in search of a
men's room. It was a small, equally dark cubicle, which got
its only light from a strange little half-opened window I
wouldn't even have noticed if my knee hadn't struck its
shutter in the dark. A window screen was the only barrier
between this bathroom and what I assumed to be a single
shower stall. As I crouched to open the shutter-it was
actually like a small closet door — to get myself enough
light to find the toilet, which I had seen as I opened the
door to the room itself but was now lost to me in the dark,
I heard someone enter the shower room. The stall itself was
not more than six feet from my eyes. While I was wondering
how to close the shutter just enough to get a bit of light,
I saw the yellow flowers of a woman's bath robe. Hastily I
bent to shut the window. I found myself wedged between the
bathroom door and the foot of the toilet bowl. The shutter
creaked on its hinges at the slightest pressure.
From my prison corner I watched the woman take off her
robe. My eyes were drawn to her smooth dark back as she
dropped the shoulder straps of her small bra, dropped the
bra itself to her stomach, turned the hook to the front and
let the thing fall away as she did with some miniscule lace
panties. She had no strap mark at all in the small of her
back and only the thinnest of white strips where her bikini
kept the sun off the lower, rounded part of her buttocks.
She seemed very young with small, hardish breasts, long,
deep-furrowed back, round thighs, slightly heavy calves. I
saw her body from below, I couldn't see her face, only her
hair in a thick braid that swung with her motions. She
turned abruptly to hang her underwear and robe, which she
had simply swept up from around her feet, someplace above
my window, and as she advanced and I saw the front of her
brown thighs, her small hips and the glossy black of her
pubic hair, the lovely full belly and small breasts, with
just a brief band of untanned white across the blackish
nipples, her face almost rapturous, her unsurprised eyes
— she seemed to be coming almost to meet me — I
recognized the French girl from the boat.
My hands shook so they rattled against the door, but she
had already turned to start the water flowing and was now
disappearing behind the dirty grey curtain of the stall. I
thought I heard footsteps on the noisy wooden stairs which
were just around the corner from me, bathroom door knob
being tried now. I waited, then slipping out in a flash I
gained my own room and used the sink instead. My head
throbbed as I let some tepid water run over my fingers. I
lay on the bed, then I fell asleep and missed even the late
dinner hour in the restaurant below.
The next morning I boarded the bus early, having scarcely
opened my suitcase. All I had seen of Tripolis was the
highway in and out. And all I was to see of Sparta was the
town square, again, from the window of the bus. We skirted
Vroulia on the road to Mistra. There I went over the ruins
of the Medieval city in a daze, finding myself lag behind
the group, dropping to sit on a wall, thirsting for cool
water. Next came Arcadia, a drive through Megalopolis, and
the high road to Corinth. In choosing not to leave the tour
in Sparta, I had the feeling of having escaped something,
though I did not quite know what.
I studied the ruins of Corinth — Pompeii of
Peleponesia — with unswerving industry, examining
each temple porch, polished by a million sandaled feet,
each fragment of sculpture, each reinforced column; but
always in the grip of an uneasy sense I was being watched
over, spied upon... It was an oppressive, even ominous
feeling, which pursued me back to Athens, to Piraeus, and
even onto the boat returning to Brindisi. I'd lost my
appetite, too.
That evening as I took some air along a country road near
our hotel on the outskirts of Corinth, I came across the
little Greek man and hailed him as he sat, rather forlornly
I thought, in a streetside café and shop. He seemed to have
been expecting me. But instead of any greeting, he shook
his head incredulously.
The owner arrived to take my order for an ouzo — it was the
only thing my stomach would hold-and told me in Greek that
my friend had been robbed.
Robbed? I asked. Of what?
Of everything.
Touto?
Touto. He, too, shook his head.
I turned to my friend and asked if he'd had traveler's
checks. They would replace them, I added. The owner
answered that he'd put every cent of his money in twenty
and hundred dollar bills. Someone had entered his hotel
room while he was out searching for his relatives (I
gathered from his despondency that he hadn't found anyone
who remembered him) and cleaned him out. They stole his
return boat ticket, his Instamatic camera, all his film
packs. They even took his Gillette Adjustable Safety
Razor.
Had he notified the police?
The owner said he had, but they couldn't guarantee
anything. He'd already wired Plainfield for his daughter to
send him jet fare home. He would leave Greece immediately.
I offered him some money, but he shook his head. He seemed
in a state of shock, afterwards I wondered if he had really
recognized me.
It wasn't until I had returned to Athens, to the same hotel
with the view of the spotlighted Acropolis from my window,
that I remembered who he must have been. He had mentioned
Plainfield a couple of times, and I began to recall having
been taken there on a visit to New Jersey by my maternal
grandfather, Angel Polisson. The little man, whose wife had
been a second cousin to my grandfather's brother's wife,
had appeared with his wife at my great aunt's house one
Sunday afternoon. I had been sent out to play with my
cousins, but something had frightened me, or maybe I felt
strange, having just met them. . . No, it suddenly came to
me that the girls, they were ten and twelve, I was much
younger, had been reading comic books about people being
taken prisoner and tortured and they tried to tie me to a
post in the barn and I got scared and ran away. (For the
rest of the two weeks they made fun of me). I came in from
the barn and hung round my grandfather until he hiked me up
on his knees and placed his incredibly large hands on my
thighs as he always did to hold me in place. He smelled of
Turkish tobacco, ouzo and mothballs. And the little man
— he seemed as old to me then as he was now —
had looked kindly at me and given me a nickel, which my
mother had taught me always to refuse, but my grandfather
pressed it into my palm. He knew I would spend it on Eskimo
Pie. It was that man, I was certain, for he wore a cloth
cap even then.
When I woke up the next morning, I thought I had overslept
into the hottest part of the day. As I fumblingly packed my
suitcase, I began to realize I had a fever. I wanted to
leave Greece.
While the boat made its way slowly up the Ionian Sea, from
Piraeus to Brindisi, the feeling of uneasiness, the fever
itself, localized in my body. I had the impression at first
of being violently seasick — it was absurd, I'd been born at
the margins of the Atlantic, had sailed in boats of a
thousand varieties ever since I could walk — but I knew that
fever does not accompany simple mal de mer, and I
fled the first meal, suffering for the rest of the trip
from vomiting and diarrhea. I couldn't even bring myself to
touch the plate of boiled and buttered white rice with
lemon juice the steward offered me, and which reminded me
of how my grandmother would appear at my house, as if by
magic, to make it when any of us was ill.
I took a room in a small hotel near the docks in Brindisi
and told the desk clerk I didn't want to be disturbed. The
dark room gave, I believe, onto a small common courtyard in
which women talked and bickered and children fought and
shouted day and night as I shuddered in my bed using
blankets, my own clothes and underwear, even bathroom
towels to warm myself. . .
It would seem I had really stopped in my father's
village. I remember Vroulia, the single dusty street
that led me from the bus stop, or the place where the bus
had left me, between the rows of dusty, low, whitewashed
stone and clay-plastered houses. With unaccountable
boldness I went up to one of those wooden doors which
seemed to hang in space rather than to be suspended on any
hinge. I knocked and the door swung open at the pressure.
The dwelling, or rather the single room which was the
house, was empty. Some leather pouches hung in the gloom,
and there was a table. I turned to find the door partly
shut again and the back of it stuck all over with odd
nails, some bent to act as hooks, others protruding
straight out. I fingered them, or wanted to. Then I went
out and along the road, the sensation of the rusty nails
still in my fingers. The slightest disturbance of my feet
seemed to stir up the dust of the road between the houses.
Even the few olive trees that grew near the houses had
their leaves silvered with dust. I kept to the side of the
road, up against the fronts of the houses, which, if you
looked quickly, seemed to form a long wall, splattered here
with some mud, patched there with darker clay.
I turned to discover a heavily bearded priest flanked by
two boys struggling through the dust with ikons stuck on
tops of poles. The priest swung a censer, the dust covered
his skirts — they were permeated with it — and the boys marched
resolutely, followed by some old women, dressed in black,
with their heads bound up in black cloth. I heard a droning
as of insects in the heat and I remember thinking it was
the bus making its way laboriously through the hills. Then
some men came carrying a small, thin box of dark wood.
For a while I thought I had been following the procession,
my attention was so riveted upon the people. I had a
feeling I could see them from both front and back. But when
it must have been some destination we had to reach or had
already reached I found myself alone again. I knew if I
negotiated a certain hilly place I'd find them, yet I
seemed to succeed only in losing myself, first along the
backs of houses (at one point I had a presentiment that if
I parted some vines I'd see a family eating in their
garden — I saw the table already set) and then among the
olive trees. I think I smelled the incense as it came at my
face, like the perfume of thyme when you walked through a
field of it, blossoms bruising underfoot.
I was standing at the foot of a low hill (I had my hand on
the ball of a railing at the foot of a wooden stairway) I
started up the hill (the steps were all worn) There was
some oleander but I couldn't smell it (halfway up the
staircase I looked down at a wooden desk in the lobby of an
old seacoast hotel) I saw trees ahead and before them some
stones, small boulders, actually round, smooth (the
stairway I recognized, could foresee each moment of the
ascent: I knew I'd find some rungs gone and worry about
myself as a child falling through them) Ahead was a man in
a faded blue skirt of countless wrappings of gauze (now I
waited for the rest: always at this point as I tried to get
up the stairs the lobsters began to appear in the spaces of
the rungs, claws first, shivering about on the wood, I knew
the sound) The old man would be the little man of the
Acropolis (the claws clacked) He wasn't (at that point I
would try to evade the claws) He would be my grandfather,
naturally (then they would be still like naked cloth dolls
with elongated limbs, hanging between the rungs) My father?
(stairs were bridge or ramp over creek at end of beach) Not
my father! (they were books piled madly up and over,
slipping as I raced over them) No one I knew! (I was
plunging among the covers and pages (I tried to thrust my
camera at his face (the structure of books caved in —
On the train north to Bologna I recalled that my hand had
shot out wildly to reach the cord of my bedside lamp in
Florence, to flick the switch of my reading lamp in
Gloucester, to grope, finally, for the string in the middle
of the room in Brindisi. But the fever was still in my
blood and my eyes would fix on things like a screw in the
metal fixtures in the train compartment and I would recall
a wall lamp in my mother's bedroom with her hat on it I had
taken to be a woman entering the room at night as I lay in
my mother's bed in childhood; even now I would often find
myself in the center of my own room for no reason at all
except that when the "white lady" materialized at my
bedside I always wanted to get away from her. . .
A youngish Italian had been talking to me and I had been
answering him, I believed, when I'd only been forming
sentences in my mind (Si, in Atene ci si po' star bene a
poco prezzo) and found him waiting politely, even
attentively for my reply. He advised a banana for my
stomach. I bought one from the food man: my companion
chose an orange and the dust blew in on us. He seemed
displeased. Then I noticed he was carrying a copy of
Svevo's Senilita` and I asked him if he had ever read La
Cosienza di Zeno.
Yes, he said. Brutto, no?
I could muster neither the language nor the strength to
argue with him. He got off early, in Pesaro, and I slept
until Bologna. It was night and cooler when I boarded the
train from Bologna to Firenze. I felt even better in
Firenze, debated walking to my room, then took a taxi and
had to lean against it finally to find a couple hundred
lire among all the drachmas.
My landlady looked aghast when I arrived. She said she
hadn't expected me for another two weeks. You're ill, she
said. Go to bed. I'll bring you some boiling tea.
It took me another two weeks to get round to apologizing to
my father for not having written him from Greece, for not
even having sent a card from Sparta —
"But you did send one," my mother wrote back, "a very
nice one of the plain below Mistra with the Eurotas River
running through it..."
For weeks afterwards I thought I kept catching sight of the
French girl in Florence. October came and I didn't see her
any more. In the middle of November, just at the time of my
birthday, I received a bulky envelope from the Akadia Hotel
in Athens. It contained all those photographs of me, and I
spread them out on my table and looked at them
absentmindedly. Then I shuffled them together and stuck
them away in my dresser drawer. Later in the spring, when I
changed rooms, I sent them to my father. That part of the
journey was over.
(Note: Title and epigraph of this story are from an open
letter to Romain Rolland by Sigmund Freud, Collected
Papers, Vol. V.)
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A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis
(Memoir version, 2008)
A little man in a brown suit approached me on the
Acropolis. Holding out his Kodak Instamatic Camera, he
asked me to take a picture of him. While he posed in front
of the broken marble, I shifted position to avoid two
flanks of German tourists, who marched around us, finally
managing to get him and the Parthenon carefully in the
picture frame. Dwarfed by the temple, he stood stiffly,
reverently removing his yellow cloth cap. I snapped and he
waited. I snapped again, as the film advanced
automatically.
"You don't have one?" He seemed surprised I didn't own a
camera. I noticed he had a couple of pre-loaded film packs
in his hand. His pockets bulged with them, too. He turned
to go. Dizzy, suddenly, and disoriented, I stood for a
moment in the heat, wondering what was familiar about him.
Then I hurried to rejoin my group, which gathered in front
of the Erechtheon, while our guide spoke about the ideal
forms of the Caryatides.
As she lectured, I imagined the ghosts of what might have
been my own ancestors greatly amused at the touring
parties, comprised mostly of women, streaming over the
ruins to possess themselves of something of the past, but
most of all surprised, as Freud first assumed he was,
because the place really did exist in all its hot
dustiness, it wasn't just a figment of his or the race's
imagination.
It turned out the little man was in our group. He came and
sat next to me on the tour bus, as we were being driven to
the National Archeological Museum. Our guide announced
that we had avoided the worst heat by going to the
Acropolis first. Speaking a mixture of Greek and American,
the little man started to tell me how he had left Greece
before he was twelve. Arriving in America with empty
pockets, he had worked in restaurants in Boston and New
York as a kitchen boy and then as a waiter. In Jersey City
he had opened his own luncheonette; but he couldn't make a
go of it, he said. His wife was always sick. So he took a
job as a short-order cook in a diner in Plainfield. Then
his wife died and he went to live with his daughter and her
family after he retired on Social Security. He told me he
had been saving all his life for this trip. First his
failure had eaten up the money, then his wife's hospital
bills. Now he had enough money from a small insurance
policy that had been his wife's. After seeing all the
sights, he confided, he was going to visit his home village
near Sparta.
We walked between rows of Attic, Mycenaean, Cretan-
Mycenaen, Megalopolitan and Cyprio-Acadian pottery — brightly
painted and glazed jars, urns, vessels, and shards — but he
looked neither to the left or right. I asked him if he
would like a photograph of himself with the great bronze
statue of Poseidon that had recently been rescued from the
bottom of the Aegean, but he didn't seem interested. Yet
we were all haunted by images of ourselves; they literally
dogged our footsteps.
You arrived at the Olympic Stadium to find a boy waving a
photo of yourself taken on the Acropolis. At the theater
of Dionysios another boy advanced to meet us with an
armload of pictures of ourselves looking dazedly at the
columns of the temple of Apollo, with the Acropolis in the
background. Lenses had sought us out at each destination
and recorded our presence; the images had been processed at
lightning speed and here they were for ten drachmas a
piece. I found myself confronted by myself looking
quizzically at the rear porch of the Parthenon, a
handkerchief applied to my neck to absorb the perspiration
that had also soaked my shirt.
Later that evening I was sitting up naked in bed in my
hotel to see the Acropolis out my window lighted up like a
crèche. I had started to write my father a letter. I
wanted to add a few more thoughts before going out to
dinner. I felt more alone now and I knew this would only
be accentuated by the strangeness of the city. As soon as
I caught sight of any two people together, walking arm in
arm or talking, a sense of vulnerability came over me.
A French girl, whom I had noticed on the boat from
Brindisi, was also on the tour. On the boat I assumed she
was unaccompanied; often at the pool I would catch sight of
her alone in a loose green skirt and white blouse, her face
cut by a thin strip of black sunglasses, long dark hair
pinned up in a bun at the back of her head. She glanced at
me occasionally on deck as I sat talking with a Dutch
historian, who claimed to have been a student of
Huizinga's. The cruise wore on. The girl didn't have the
same sitting at dinner, so I would walk the decks amid the
dripping bodies of Swedish schoolgirls trying to find her.
She was small and compactly made. Like me, she seemed to be
a university student on holiday. I spotted a novel by Butor
under her arm, but I held back from approaching her. My
French was horrible and I thought it would be gauche
speaking to her in English.
Since docking at Piraeus, she had slipped out of sight, but
there she was again, across from me, sitting two or three
seats up the aisle of the tour bus on the way to the
theater of Dionysios. There was a moment in which I could
have gotten up to speak. She had seemed to recognize me,
but when I tried to think of things to say in French only
Italian phrases came. She turned her face slightly in my
direction, then the bus started up and the little man came
over to sit down next to me. Without out my knowing it the
girl had gotten off. As I was looking out the window in
downtown Athens, I caught sight of her walking by herself.
Then she was swept into a crowd, green skirt swaying at her
back and legs. I turned to find the little man making his
way to the exit, too.
I had begun to tell my father that I was finally in Athens,
although I'd had a sense of Greece already in Brindisi,
when I entered a restaurant and tasted in the sauce on my
roast lamb the mint, olive oil and lemon of my
grandmother's cooking. And the perfume of singed oregano
hung all about the dining room. I got that far, half on
paper, half in my head, and then I began to think of that
girl again, probably now lost to me forever.
There were things I wanted to share with my father. I was
about to travel in the country he himself hadn't seen since
he was nine years old. I described exactly where I had gone
that morning and what I had seen; but I left out the girl
and the little Greek man with the camera. When I got
through two closely written pages on airmail stationery, I
found I hadn't said anything essential. And in leaving out
the French girl and the man with the brown suit and yellow
cloth cap I felt I had falsified my account. Setting aside
the letter, I went out. I went, in my mind, out searching
for that girl.
I never resumed my letter. Yet there was a pressure to do
so. I knew I would not be seeing my father for at least
another year; and I felt that if I didn't get my thoughts
down immediately I'd lose them and maybe even my father
before I could tell him. All of this proved to be
groundless, but it was real at the time.
I met the little man again at Olympia. He had just been
photographed by a German woman, who was handing his camera
back to him, as they stood in the center of a sunken
garden, set round with fragments of marble, which was
described as having been the workshop of Praxiteles. We
accompanied each other down through the tunnel-like
entrance to the stadium itself, standing together while my
group was being walked around in the burning heat. I had
already perspired through my short-sleeved shirt; but the
little man retained his brown suit jacket and constantly
renewed white shirt, buttoned to the throat. His yellow
cloth cap sat squarely on his head.
It turned out he was having lunch at our hotel. We were
placed at a large table smelling of fresh linen along with
two middle-aged German women, one who had taken his picture
and another with whom I had exchanged a few words about
archaeology during the stadium tour.
After an excellent lunch of chilled cucumber soup,
dolmades in egg-lemon sauce, and fruit salad, the
Germans asked if they could smoke. Enjoying the fine smell
of Turkish tobacco, I looked at the ruins below us among
the cypresses. The Germans were speaking together in their
own tongue. The little man excused himself to go to sleep.
I wandered down to the bus to ask our guide about departure
time. Helen, whose eyes were partitioned by thick, blue-
framed American-style glasses, began complaining to me that
no one seemed interested in Olympia. They weren't asking
any questions. It was probably the heat, I told her. She
said usually Germans were more talkative — not as much as
Americans, but they asked more intelligent questions. The
Americans, she offered, cared only to verify their previous
ideas of places or things, to have anecdotes they had heard
or been told by their friends, who had taken the same
tours, repeated. It seemed to give them a sense of
continuity, she said. The world became one big place where
you and your friends were always at home. And your presence
at any place — Delphi, the Acropolis, St. Peter's — merely
allowed you to check off another entry on a list of
conquests or accomplishments.
"Why go anywhere?" I asked.
"For status," Helen answered. "To show your friends that
you have the money to spend and the time in which to spend
it. Also, to show yourself to the world, to let yourself be
seen in your conspicuous prosperity, your smug superiority,
your capitalist ascendancy.
"The worst offenders," Helen continued, "are the Greek-
Americans, the ones who were born here. What do they know
of present-day Greece? They left here before they could
read and write. They tell you they come back to see the
glories of the Motherland, when they really come to lord it
over the ones who didn't leave, who remained here. They no
longer speak Greek. My English is better than
theirs! The only language they know is money!"
"I'm curious," I interjected. "How do you fit me into
this?"
Helen was undaunted:
"You're an intellectual!"
"How do you know that?"
"I heard you discussing Lessing with that German woman."
The group regathered slowly after lunch. On the way to
Tripolis Helen confided to me that she was coming to
America in the fall to pursue graduate studies at Columbia.
"In archaeology?" I asked.
"Of course not," she frowned. "Chemistry."
With Tripolis next, the whole journey became problematic,
for after that we would pass through Sparta on the way to
Mistra. On that road lay my father's village. I had been
advised at the tour office in Athens that I could leave my
bus in Sparta, remain as long as I wished in that vicinity,
and rejoin any subsequent tour, thus completing my round
trip to Athens. But the closer we seemed to get to Sparta,
the more reluctant I became to leave the tour. I couldn't
put my finger on the precise reason for my hesitation about
visiting my father's birthplace. According to my parents,
we had a few remaining relatives in the village, but
nothing had been arranged beforehand. Certainly it would
have pleased my father had I gone to Vroulia and located
his family's house and farm. I might even have found an
ancient villager, who would recall the little boy, who,
wearing his mother's shoes, set out one day in 1908 to join
his father in the cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts.
Years before, my father had told me about Vroulia and the
family farm with the same loving accuracy he would describe
Market and Suffolk streets in Lowell, or Endicott Street in
Boston. His was an accuracy, born, I knew, of having lived
in furnished rooms in those streets and of having sold
newspapers and shined the shoes of nameless men along them.
It must also have come from having to puzzle out the names
inscribed on their corner posts and the signs of their
shops by day, while at night in his room he taught himself
how to read and write his new language with the help of
Webster's International Dictionary, his original copy of
which we still possessed, rebound and lying open on the
desk in my bedroom in Gloucester.
My father stayed less than a year at the Massachusetts
Cotton Mill, where he was paid a dollar eighty-five a week
to sweep floors and empty spittoons. Leaving his own
father, who had died of consumption before they were even
reunited, in an unmarked grave in the Lowell Municipal
Cemetery, he moved to Boston in 1909, where he began to
sell newspapers and shine shoes. By the time he was
sixteen, he was working behind the tobacco counter in
Liggett's Drugstore in Boston's Little Building.
It was of my father's stories that I thought, as I looked
at the Peloponnesian countryside from the window of our
bus. Yet, contrary to our guide Helen, I do not believe I
went in search of verification of those images of Greece my
father had given me, as though I'd never believed or
delighted in his stories of growing up on the farm in
Vroulia, or sleeping on the sugar bags in the back room of
his uncle's shop in Sparta. I would take issue with Helen
on that point; but as the trip wore on and our bus
struggled up the narrow mountainous roads my father had
often spoken of, a feeling of great oppression came over
me.
We arrived in Tripolis in the middle of a searing
afternoon. I was faint with the heat and went immediately
to bed without eating. The next morning I boarded the bus
early, having scarcely opened my suitcase. All I took for
breakfast was a single cup of granular black coffee and a
roll without butter. I had seen nothing of Tripolis except
the highway in and out; and all I was to see of Sparta was
its central square, again, from the window of the bus. I
remember being surprised at the sight of a couple of horse-
drawn carriages, which seemed to give the city a 19th
century atmosphere. We skirted Vroulia on the road to
Mistra. There I went over the ruins of the Medieval city in
a daze from the heat and lack of any substantial food.
Next came Arcadia, a drive through Megalopolis, and the
high road to Corinth. In choosing not to leave the tour in
Sparta, I had the feeling of having escaped something,
though I did not quite know what.
I studied the ruins of Corinth, Pompeii of Peleponesia,
with some industry, considering my state of mind, examining
each temple porch, polished by a million sandaled feet,
each fragment of sculpture, each reinforced column; but
always in the grip of an uneasy sense I was being watched
over, spied upon. It was an oppressive, even ominous
feeling, which pursued me back to Athens, to Piraeus, and
even onto the boat returning to Brindisi. I'd completely
lost my appetite.
That night as I walked in the cooling air along a country
road near our hotel on the outskirts of Corinth, I came
across the little Greek man in brown, hailing him as he sat
by himself at a café table. Instead of greeting me,
he shook his head incredulously.
The owner arrived to take my order for ouzo — it was the only
thing my stomach seemed able to accept-and told me in Greek
that my friend had been robbed.
"Robbed?" I asked. "Of what?"
"Of everything."
"Touto?"
"Touto." He, too, shook his head.
I turned to my friend and asked if he'd had traveler's
checks. They would replace them, I suggested. The owner
explained that my friend had carried all his cash in twenty
and one hundred dollar bills, exchanging them as he moved
from place to place. Someone had entered his hotel room
while he was out searching for his relatives and cleaned
him out. They stole his return boat ticket, his Instamatic
camera, all his film packs. They even took his Gillette
Adjustable Safety Razor. To make matters worse, he hadn't
found a single person in his old village who remembered
him.
Had he notified the police? I asked.
The owner said he had, but they couldn't guarantee
anything. He'd already wired Plainfield for his daughter
to send him jet fare home. He would leave Greece
immediately.
I offered him some drachmas, but the little man shook his
head. He seemed in a state of shock. Afterwards I
wondered if he had even recognized me.
It wasn't until I had returned to Athens, to the same hotel
with the view of the spotlighted Acropolis from my window,
that I remembered who that little man must have been. He
had spoken about living in Plainfield, and I recalled
having been taken there during a visit to relatives in New
Jersey with my maternal grandfather, Angel Polisson, when I
was eight years old. The little man, whose wife had been a
cousin of my grandfather's brother's wife, had appeared
with his wife at my great aunt's house one Sunday
afternoon. During the visit he had looked kindly at me, as
I remembered, smiling at the bored little boy sitting in
the midst of adults shouting at each other in Greek. He
seemed as old to me then as he was now; and he'd given me a
nickel, which my mother had taught me always to refuse. My
grandfather pressed it into my palm. Papouli knew I would
spend it on Eskimo Pie, a chocolate covered ice cream on a
stick that I had discovered during this visit and become
enamored of. It was that man, I was certain, for he wore a
cloth cap even then.
When I woke up the next morning, I thought I had overslept
into the hottest part of the day. As I fumblingly packed my
suitcase, I realized I must have had a fever.
While the boat made its way slowly up the Ionian Sea, from
Piraeus to Brindisi, the fever worsened and I fled the
first meal, suffering for the rest of the trip from
vomiting and diarrhea. I could barely bring myself to touch
the plate of boiled and buttered white rice with lemon
juice, which the steward had kindly brought to my bunk, and
which reminded me of how my grandmother would always appear
at my house, as if by magic, to prepare the same dish when
any of us was ill.
Once we had arrived in Brindisi, I found a room in a small
hotel near the dock and told the desk clerk I didn't want
to be disturbed. I took a couple of the sulfonamide
tablets, which the ship's doctor had pressed on me in a
small white envelope, and I slept for two days, huddling in
my bed under blankets even though the temperature outside
must have been at least a hundred degrees.
On the train north to Bologna I still felt feverish, though
the other symptoms had dissipated. An Italian medical
student, with whom I had been discussing the novels of
Svevo, advised a banana for my stomach. I bought one from
the vendor, who was passing through our car, and my
companion chose an orange.
"It sounds to me like you picked up one of those bacteria
that are common to travelers without immunity," he
suggested, extending his peeled orange to me across the
space of the compartment. "Rest is the best medicine."
He got off early in Pesaro, and I slept until Bologna.
It was night and much cooler by the time I boarded the
train from Bologna to Firenze. I felt even better once I
was back in Firenze. I debated walking from the station
back to my room in Piazza San Marco; then I took a taxi,
leaning against it, finally, to find a couple hundred lire
among all the drachmas in my pocket left over from Greece.
My landlady looked aghast when I arrived. She said she
hadn't expected me for at least another week.
"You're ill," she said. "Go to bed. I'll bring you
some boiling tea."
It took me another two weeks to apologize to my father for
not having written him from Sparta, not to speak of my
guilt about avoiding the visit to his hometown.
"But you did send a note," my mother wrote back, "on a
postcard of the plain below Mistra with the Eurotas River
running through it."
For weeks afterward on the streets of Florence I thought I
kept catching sight of the French girl from Athens; but
when I got close to her it wasn't the person I had first
been attracted to on the boat from Brindisi. October came
and I returned to classes at the University and my job
teaching English at night. In the middle of November, just
at the time of my twenty-third birthday, when I was living
in Settignano, I received a bulky envelope from the Akadia
Hotel in Athens. It contained those photographs of me that
had been taken during our tour of Athens. I spread them
out on my writing table and looked at them as if they had
documented someone else's journey. Then I shuffled them
together and stuck them away in a dresser drawer. Later in
the spring, after I'd moved back down into the city, I sent
them to my father.
My parents were understanding, when I'd finally confessed
to them my inability to stop at my father's birth place in
Vroulia and the guilt I felt about it, although this
conversation didn't occur until I returned home to
Gloucester two years later. By then they were planning
their own trip to Greece; and when they finally arrived in
the region where my father was born and from which my
mother's parents had emigrated, they spent a great deal of
time in Sparta, Vroulia and the surrounding towns and
villages. My father was welcomed back by relatives and
townspeople, who remembered him and his family. They even
helped him find the farmhouse he'd been born in, reduced to
a pile of stones and shattered timbers, as the result of an
air-raid during the German occupation of Greece. Dad also
discovered that he'd become the legal owner of the
property. Shortly before his death, in 1975, of heart
disease, having offered it first to my brother and me, he
deeded the farm over to his remaining relatives, expecting
that he would never return to Greece.
It wasn't until after I'd returned home to Gloucester that
I came across Sigmund Freud's essay, whose title I have
borrowed for that of my own narrative. In the form of an
open letter to Romain Rolland, Freud attempts to understand
his experience of dizziness, accompanied by a panic attack
and an unaccountable loss of memory, during his first visit
to the Acropolis.
"It must be that a sense of guilt was attached to
the satisfaction in having got so far," he wrote. "There
was something about it that was wrong, that was from the
earliest times forbidden." For Freud had traveled to
Greece before his own father, who, during his entire
lifetime, had dreamed of seeing the Acropolis, but was
never able to realize that dream. As he attempted to
explain in his letter, Freud had beaten his father to that
goal, and he remained guilty because of it.
"It seems as though the essence of success were to have
got further than one's father," he wrote to the great
French novelist Rolland, "and as though to excel one's
father were something forbidden."
Perhaps I had experienced some of Freud's same guilt in
that feeling of dizziness and disorientation-a veritable
panic — that had come over me in the heat on the Acropolis,
or more specifically as I approached my father's home town,
avoiding my own visit to it. Perhaps there was some taboo
that prohibited me from achieving this dream of my father's
before he returned home himself, though he had encouraged
me to do so. In any event, my father had actually gone
home and it had been a rewarding homecoming for him and my
mother. Who was I to inhibit that joy in my father's sense
of success, even if such a concern, and its attendant
guilt, lay solely in my own mind?
And what of the little Greek man from Plainfield whose
troubling presence on the tour had seemed to accompany my
hesitant journey to my father's hometown? Did his apparent
failure to have achieved the immigrant's dream, followed by
an unfortunate homecoming, represent the obverse of my
father's success in business and his eventful return home?
A great deal happened to me during that brief trip to
Greece, and I suppose I should have realized how fraught
with conflict such a voyage into my own history, if not
into my unconscious, might turn out to be. I've never
returned to Greece, and like my own father, I don't expect
I ever will. As for falling ill in Greece or my precipitous
departure from my father's country, perhaps only Freud
could explain that part of the journey. And the elusive
French girl? Was there some portent in her appearance, or
should I again defer to Freud, who might well have advised
that sometimes a girl is just a girl?
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