[We
first arrived in Nauplion in September 1977. This entry is about how it was
then, before the old houses were painted and air-conditioned and
turned into boutique hotels, before the voices of children vanished,
before the public oven became a bank. The avge man
is no more, my Venetian house has been replaced by a gelato shop, the
baby-blue helix is white. This wall that we saw from our balcony has been
replaced by a bar with red chairs, but the red no longer means what
it did 40 years ago. Photo: Bill Connelly.]
In
Nauplion, early October is the time of year when the grey mullet run
in to the land. After dusk, half the men in town stand along the
waterfront dangling unbaited hooks in the water pulling out dozens of
fish, while the other half sit at the waterfront cafes and criticize.
Every evening after supper we walked the waterfront to watch the
mullet catch and then to watch the shrimpers.
There
was a strict division of labor: men fished for mullet; small boys
went shrimping. Each boy had a small net and a flashlight to shine
straight down the side of the quai into the water: the shrimp eyes
reflected light like tiny Christmas bulbs and the boys scooped them
out, although it might take an hour to collect four or five shrimp.
After the shrimp, we walked into the darkness at the end of the quai,
past the broken boats, past the football field, and up along the
coast road, watching the fishing boats come in, the lights flickering
along the road that rimmed the bay, the small soft owls swooping down
from the telephone lines.
In
the daytime it was still warm enough to swim. We took the bus eight
miles over to the great rock of Homeric Asine, spread blankets on the
cave side away from the wind, and spent the days with books and
picnics of figs and tomatoes and cheese. The children climbed over
the ancient stones and searched the thorn and thyme for shards which
they threw down to me, shouting. Late in the afternoon, waiting for
the bus back to Nauplion, farmers walking home would stop and greet
us, as was Odysseus, "Welcome, strangers. Where are you
from? Why are you here?" and then take us home with them to give us
tangerines or eggs or tomatoes for our supper.
*
* * *
I
had always wanted to live in Greece, ever since I was thirteen and
read about Mycenae, read about the shadows of the grape arbor moving
in the firelight at La
Belle Hélène, and young Agamemnon pouring the wine.
Once in Greece, I reread the book where I thought I had found the
image: it had no grape arbor, though La
Belle Hélène does, over the
deep veranda;, and Agamemnon has a grandson.
The
grape arbor was the first of many images, and finally the desire to
come to Greece was as persistent as salt in the mouth, the decision
as clear as a gold coin in the hand. There were children to persuade,
a house to sell, farewells to make. It was four months between the
decision and the oily, suffocating brown dawn when we sailed from a
Brooklyn pier, passed under the necklace of lights of the Verrezano
bridge, and set out into the fogbound Atlantic.
A
month later, there was a bus ride from Corinth to Nauplion on a rainy
night: two hours of standing-room-only on a sprained ankle, juggling
backpacks, gasping against the accumulation of cigarette smoke and
body heats -- an open window apparently meant instant pneumonia --
all of us terrified by our first experience of normal Greek night
driving. The windshield wipers were out of order; the driver
extended the life of his headlights by using them only on straight
stretches where they could shine the farthest; he otherwise relied on
his horn and the icons over his head illuminated by a red light to
negotiate passing on the curves.
We
swayed down through the mountains of the Dervenakia, passed a sign pointing to Mycenae,
halted in Argos where most of the passengers got off and we sat down,
and then tore along a straight road past the bulk of Tiryns. The
night rain was luminous for miles from the lights of Palamidi, a
great whale-shaped hill overshadowing Nauplion with an illuminated
fortress in the shape of a Byzantine headdress with pendants.
The
Nauplion bus stop was closed for the evening. We stumbled into the
first taxi, clutching at the phrase-book to find the words for "cheap
hotel." There was a pelt through narrow streets under dripping
balconies, and we were disgorged at the cheap hotel. Fatigue was
washed over with soft color: a white church with a terracotta roof,
a gilded shrine hung with roses, cascades of jasmine and four
o'clocks over the yellow walls and white pilasters of the Hotel Otto.
Inside, there was a circular staircase, a baby-blue helix floating
up to a painted ceiling.
"Of
course," said Apostolos, reaching for our bags, "you can
stay as long as you like.
We
breakfasted in the Otto's minute formal garden. It had orange and
lemon trees, arbors of jasmine and roses, basil, and cages of
ornamental birds. It also had a house across the street which
happened to be for rent. We wandered the town for four days,
trudging up and down the slippery stone steps of the hill, trying to
make up our minds, trying to assimilate the newness and the
strangeness and the beauty.
Old
Nauplion is built on a hillside. Half the streets are vertical
stairs going up to the castle or down to the harbor, past a thousand
shadings of terracottas and creams and buffs and yellows on old
buildings painted so many times that they have had no edges for a
very long time. Every yard has a grape arbor, an orange or fig or
lemon tree, a window box spilling geraniums. In early fall, Nauplion
had the air of perpetual teatime held among sets left over from one
of the lighter Italian operas. The Venetians of 1700 built bulky
stone mansions; scattered among them are smaller, slenderer plastered
houses built according to what the Bavarians of the 1830s insisted
Classical architecture ought to have been: graceful houses of creams
and blues and buffs and ochres and mauves, all with balconies and
architraves and Corinthian capitals and acanthus leaves and tiny
sphinx faces. Above the city, the fortress of Acro-Nauplion is
rimmed with sharp-edged Venetian walls that blend into rougher
Frankish and Byzantine ruins, and all are supported by massive
Cyclopean stones.
The
streets were full of cats and the air was full of bells. Beside the
church bells, rung often but on schedules known only to God, the bell
tower on Acro-Nauplion rang the hours and half-hours, each twice,
several minutes apart. If it were ever necessary to know the precise
time, there was the bank or the bus station, but the only times
exactness was needed was when catching a bus, and there would always
be another in half an hour, or tomorrow. There was always tomorrow:
Avrio, the most common word in Greek, possibly because
of the silken way it floats through the mouth. Nauplion offered
limitless tomorrows.
The
important thing about living in Nauplion, in Greece, is that the
physical facts of life are almost overwhelming. Every sensor of the
body is relentlessly besieged by stimuli as distinct as black olives
on a plate. Everything has a scent, a nuance, a color, a texture,
and as soon as they are perceived, a breeze passes, a cloud changes,
and everything is to be learned anew. The golden-brown mountains
multiply, merge, become blue and grey.
It
is impossible to look at something only once. Homer wrote as much as
he did, Seferis said, only because he was blind. Each street can be
identified by its blend of smells -- lemon trees, bread ovens,
leather workers, the ouzo distillery, fish soup, chestnuts roasting,
jasmine, cigarettes, olive pressings, paint, oranges on the quai.
Every corner presents another composition -- a blue Turkish fountain,
a cascade of pink roses, an old man stitching shoes, cats in the
sun, a Byzantine arch, a pyramid of apples, three children and a
priest kicking a ball. There are all the ordinary noises that chart
the day -- bells, the "Avge!" cry of the egg man, an angry
woman shouting across a narrow street, a priest chanting in the
church across the street, the gull-sound of winches, a sudden motor
cycle, a piano practiced behind closed shutters, voices arguing in a cafe, the dry rattle of the tric-trac board, the blunted sound
of oars.
With
sensory experience so acute, time blurs. One day I came back from a
hike and reported that I had seen an old Turkish fortified house, an
old Mycenean wall, an old woman and an old Byzantine church. With
one limited word to speak of two hundred years, thirty-five hundred
years, eighty years, and a thousand years, the past becomes a great
accumulation of Then, which can only mean whatever is not Now.
Kathleen
learned her Roman numerals from Venetian cannon, tracing sleet-chilled letters with mittened fingers; we swam at a beach from
which ships set sail for Troy; we filled canteens from a spring
mentioned by Pausanias. On any walk we found shards with red
Mycenean spirals or fragments of amber Byzantine glaze. Our
blue-green parrot was quadrupled in a fifth-century mosaic. The same
weeks that we went to Epidauros to see Medea or Oedipos,
we read in the paper of a woman killing her children, or of a charge
of incest in the courts, and I went to Elektra fresh from
wrangling with my teen-aged daughter.
We
were outsiders, we were guests – kseni – the word is the
same for both.
