by Eurydice (c) 1999
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
The way to reach an end is to go back to the beginning. The only way to understand is to start over, again and again, like Odysseus. Life is simpler at the beginning. So I like to retrace my steps looting absolution or relief, while inconspicuously steering my way toward Ithaca. In my mind my travels are always just beginning. It usually goes something like this:
When I was fifteen years old I went abroad to discover the world and all I took with me were my words. Before that, I had lived in the family manor for nine years, indifferent to the world beyond and free to act at will, so that I could be molested by our albino gardener who the servants said was a spirit, and spend time in our basement lying on the mud inventing epic tales of gorgeous flying heroines in ethereal flowing scarves who after tense suspense swept in and saved the world from chaos and in the process broke a few thousand male hearts. I created this world in my mind in exact details. When I was dissatisfied with it, I broke our Lenox collection or the stained-glass windowpanes, sometimes by stone, sometimes by scream. Along with talking philosophy with father, those were my deepest pleasures.
At the time, I was a Gnostic and my Dad was trying unsuccessfully to convert me to Epicureanism. He complained that I never acted as a child and had missed out on my inherent right to an unburdened joie-de-vivre and should make up for it in preadolescence. He should have suspected that puberty would change my mind about the importance of people and pleasure, but neither he nor I could have predicted how radically our positions would be reversed as soon as I hit puberty; and how swiftly the way-of-the-world would sever our powerful emotional bond. Until our fatal flight from Egypt, Id been raised with the absolute certainty that I was a special gift to the world, the little angel riding around in a quiet Rolls, surrounded by nature and comfort and Mommys singing and groveling tutors and doting relatives who secretly admonished Dad for his quirky pedagogy, and who feared that I might turn into a monster rather than a genius because of the freedoms he bestowed on me so generously. But Dad, weary of my mothers inbred, thorough, and all-encompassing dependence, and of his own inability to rebel against his familys omnipresent, labyrinthine rules that were part of our genetic coding, cultivated assiduously my independent Alexander-like spirit. As a result, I was endowed with an unswerving confidence, an unceremonious though luckily not crude sense of entitlement, a spacious feeling of solitude, a purity of heart, and a growing, unfocused rebelliousness.
On a summer day when I was nine years old, our accountant shot himself in Grandpas library. I was eating a fig when I walked in and saw his brains scattered on the crimson silk rug. That was how we learned that we were bankrupt and homeless. Mother and Grandmother fainted. The servants brought smelling salts, then we wore our valuables and sailed all day and night to Athens, leaving the servants behind. Mother and Grandmother vomited. No seasickness remedy worked. We were unwanted in Alexandria because we were Greek. Our ancestral property had been confiscated, and now we had to disappear. So I left the magic castle as an exile. It has since been converted to a public works ministry and rows of metal desks crowd every room and even verandah. I hadn't known other children until then, except rambunctious peasant kids from afar. I was told I would have to go to public school.
Once we were in Athens, father flew to Germany to look for a source of income. Grandfather went on a Greek country pilgrimage to enlist the financial help of God and old acquaintances. Mommy is extremely fragile and beautiful, half lady half pincushion. She was left in my care. She cried all day long and complained that the walls of the new apartment kept falling on her and crashing her. She hated concrete. Grandmother was moved into the hospital of a well-known shrink, because she refused to speak. But I stayed confident. I latched on to language as an oar and used words to create my new place in the world. I knew (or imagined) more than my classmates, so I could influence, seduce, possess them. Survival in a democracy took work, but I loved the inner rush of power racing back and forth from my toes to my scalp. I became a social whirlwind, though inwardly I always kept my distance: deep down I knew better. I knew what was real and what was a metaphor.
I failed to make this distinction only once, when I interrupted my first schoolboy kiss sobbing to him that I was a lesbian. Having been born on Lesbos, I took my heritage literally, as one more mark of my difference or my inevitable doom. It was a romantic confirmation of my alienation. I filled my diaries with pictures of bare-breasted bimbos cut out of the local dailies and with remorseful descriptions of my perversion. I masturbated daily even though I had no word for it. I didnt know that I had such a thing as a clit until I came to America.
One day in mid-November, Mommy woke me up from my siesta in panic. The phone was out of order, the TV showed the same unintelligible military Generals message on every channel, and the chauffeur shed sent out to find a technician hadnt returned. She whined, she cried, she held me tight. Mommy rarely speaks, because she doesnt like to. She has a tiny girlish whisper and thinks that on every occasion a person must keep her manners, have dry cool hands and clean feet and buffed nails and never touch her face. Beyond that, she doesnt think much about life. Neither of us knew what a junta was or that we lived under one. We heard commotion in the street. Mommy has a fear of mobs, not agoraphobia, just a foreboding that our family will be killed by lynching mobs one day, like the ancient scientist of Alexandria, Hypatia, who died in the hands of Christians while the great library burned. So I volunteered to run to the nearby kiosk to call our family friends for help. She liked that.
The polio-stricken kiosk-dwarf who usually chatted me up tiresomely, now swore at me when I asked to use the phone and waved me away angrily, shouting, Go home, girl. I always hate hearing that. So I walked to the neighborhood police station to ask for help or an explanation and I was met inside with the same angry impatience. Stray adults in the street yelled What are you doing out? as they raced by. The daily semblance of order, the jokes of the idlers on the street, the familiar armies of ebullient workers, housewives, horny urchins and shopkeepers, the stuff that animated the citys rowdy everyday world had vanished. There were no hawkers leaning out of stalls praising their cheap wares, no bulging shopping bags shifting hands, no striped umbrellas flapping in the breeze marking the rows of clamoring cafes, and, most shocking of all, no stylish and stylized students gawking at one another in the cafes. It felt like an end. I didnt want to face that possibility. Also, I felt responsible for Mommy, and I resented being ignored as a child, so I kept walking looking for someone who would explain to me what had gone awry, looking for reason. As I went on, I became surrounded by clusters of unkempt young people screaming or singing in hordes that were moving down Lycabyttus hill. Eventually human bodies filled the avenue of Democracy and we could barely move. Breasts, arms and buttocks burned against mine. It did not feel claustrophobic because of the crowds contagious exuberance. A nearly hysterical woman blared well-enunciated slogans through megaphones, followed by others like her who invited us to sing along old moving patriotic songs. Homemade flags were unfurled, makeshift signs came up, most of them red, my throat hurt from shouting. I loved the heady farrago of fear and power and consequence that came out of being part of a rapturous mob. Our communal exhilaration ran through the crammed bodies in the streets, making them electric. It felt erotic. I didnt want it to end. I didnt want to ask what was happening, to admit that I was an outsider. I yelled in tandem and shook my little fist like a bonafide fanatic. I forgot my mission, my Mommy, myself. I was lost, and for the first time I knew bliss.
By the time we had squeezed our way to Freedom Square, it was dark and no one had room to move around. Leaders orated poetic words of freedom. We kept clapping, shrieking. I never heard the tanks roaring towards us, even though I felt the ground shaking under me, like an earthquake that leaves behind unbridgeable furrows. Suddenly people ran in every direction, mostly into each other. They screamed out in ugly echoes of pure terror. I felt drunk. My heart raced and, as more people fell, I finally saw the soldiers, standing waist-up in thundering green metal, shooting at us at random. I couldnt see their expressions through the smoke, but I dont think they were angry. No one laughed. A pretty black-haired boy in a white billowing shirt next to me was killed in mid-speech. His blood spurted out with tremendous force like a tiny oil well. There was teargas and explosions and screams for mercy and God and some singing. I slipped and fell on the bleeding boy and pretended to be dead. I might even have thought I was dead. My notion of death was very surreal until then.
I felt the dead boys blood trickle on my cheek, he was warm and no longer erotic. I must have sensed, unconsciously, that sex was the opposite of death. His abandon shocked me. For the first time I myself felt unquestionably alive: I was a tangible part of the body of the world, a full-fledged participant, treading the abyss between life and death. Id gone through fire and could now be anointed into adulthood. I cradled his body in my little arms, mine in death. I lay still, hiding my frail flesh in his. I kept my eyes shut and felt broken in and robbed of every fairy tale Id ever made up. I passed out from the noxious smells.
I came to at a gas station next to an old man with blazing eyes and the bushiest yellow eyebrows and a long neck scar that disappeared into his shirt, who told me hastily: Stay here for the night. Remember what youve seen. Its up to your generation now. He limped off. All night I heard sirens and inarticulate shouts. The next day I went to the nearest police lot, declared myself lost and was driven home. Mommy had been hospitalized for anxiety; Dad was flying home. Mommy had made a vow to the Virgin for my survival and when she came home we bought a candle my height and a silver ex-voto of a curly-haired schoolgirl, and we two went on our knees through the deserted streets to St. Marys cathedral to fulfill her vow. Id never seen Mommy so animated. I had never seen her body energetic before.
That was 1973. I slowly found out about the executions and tortures of thousands of guerrillas and intellectuals in prisons and on barren Aegean islands, and about the University students uprising that had ended in massacre, a small scene of which I had witnessed, which was auguring the dawn of the Colonels demise. It was all information that was whispered with fear and disseminated with care because it could be deadly. My family and its circle now and then discussed it in code and great secrecy and never chose sides. They had a strong inherent distaste for covert insurrections and the deep-seated fear of becoming scapegoats.
The Partys upper echelons approved me, and I joined the Communist Youth, signing the cryptic ominous document that confirmed me as an enemy of the authorities and turned my life into a liability. I had had to pass many schoolgirl-size tests of courage to gain the Partys confidence. I didnt see my membership as a betrayal of my family, its class and its heritage, but my parents would if they knew. To them, it was unimaginable. I was eleven.
Organized rebellion proved to be good for me. I became more popular, active, excited by putting together a revolution and shaping a peoples history. Every day I sold illicit pamphlets on street corners, recruited new idolizing members, attended underground procedures, staged rallies and school strikes, challenged the authority of my most dedicated professors, and elaborately lied at home. At night I sneaked out of the sleeping apartment to write on walls with red paint or to plaster government buildings with illegal posters promising hope, to run from cruising cops and talk into the small hours with comrades whod left their youths behind in concentration camps and in torture chambers. I envied their bare unbroken spirit, their commitment and common sense. We drank ouzo in unlit hovels and sang off-tune guerrilla anthems till dawn, and then we snuck out for fried honey cakes and fresh goat milk.
I knew Lenins words by page number, I knew camouflaged cafes filled with muffled printing presses, smoke and hunger. I liked the hotheaded clandestine meetings under the marble agora, arguing down bearded Maoists by the Venetian fountain, or making out against the abandoned sea fort beneath the stone lions soaked by the hard-hitting waves. I roamed the blazing streets, addicted at that early age to a high of living that I continued to seek from then on, until the deaths began and one by one cured me, sucked my hunger out of me like a vein of love that popped and emptied, its wasted pulse painting the world irretrievably black.
By 1979 I was bored stiff. In late March I had carried the school flag at the national parade, and the undiluted irony of that honor was the only thing that had soothed me all year. Some days the graffiti on our school walls read, I love EU or Long live EU! I liked exploding emotions; I thrived in secrecy and melodrama. I could not live in complacency. Fear had been my turn-on and I was hooked. But, day-by-day, I had less to be afraid of.
The Party indoctrinated us to abstain from drugs, promiscuity, self-loathing, foreign rock music and brand names. I summarily espoused the rules in order to move up the Youth Partys revolutionary ladder, but I never followed them. I hadnt become a communist to take orders, but to give my life to a cause, and give my daily life a great historical meaning, while one was available. Besides, I felt all along that I was trying out parts that were not mine. I lacked spontaneous empathy, unless it involved a thrill. I started suspecting I was a fraud.
At that same time, Dad had got word of my activities through a bitter principal, and weeklong dramatic arguments were taking place at home. He searched through my things and issued ultimatums that invariably contained the words family name or my honor. Id never seen him like that. Personally I felt I had passed every test, and no one had the right to dictate my behavior to me, not even the Party, certainly not my open-minded Dad. He feared that I would squander my gifts to a hopeless cause that mistook the best and the worst for equals. He stole my diaries and phone books and destroyed them to cut off that poisonous lifeline. His greatest fear was that I would get arrested. It was easy for ancient Greeks, he said, to practice democracy when they had plentiful slaves, but in todays world any one of us could end up a slave, our democracy was the tolerance of inequality, and I had no choice but to forge ahead on my own unencumbered individual path and take no prisoners. He cried, he bit his fist to the bone; he jumped up and down, his eyes rolled back. Mom, terrified by all the shouting, begged me to apologize and make up, but I resisted out of pride. Then his left arm would get paralyzed, Mom would faint, hed threaten I was giving him a heart attack. Mom would plead with me, Dad would drink himself to exhaustion and then decide it was time I got a sound beating like all the other Greek kids that he should have disciplined me all along. I hit him back. Sometimes he left red-hot palm prints on my skin, and Mommy would watch speechless without understanding our titanic clash, crying hard because her sweet charming harmless self couldnt keep the two of us from tearing each other apart.
By then Cyprus had been conquered and the Colonels jailed, and the Party had been legalized. Victory made it all tepid. There was little meaningful talk of revolution now; those of us who advocated it were ostracized. Mutiny was old news. We sold tickets to Communist Youth concerts and ran at school-wide elections, soliciting for campaign contributions and signing up volunteers for petty local causes. We canvassed affluent suburbs and advised workers to strike for higher wages and protested about the nuclear weapons on American bases. The bourgeoisie had as usual quietly won, the heroes had sold out, Americas 6th fleet was pulling out, and even the loathsome Kissinger was losing power. I grew claustrophobic in the city that was being reborn like a materialist Phoenix out of cement. The building boom made me feel small, irrelevant. Domesticity choked me. I wanted to expand my horizon, start all over again in a new setting, and see where my words combined with the local historical forces could take me there. I emptied the bank account Dad had forced me to keep to learn fiscal responsibility and took it to TWA offices where I put my finger on a massive world map. A family summer vacation had provided me a visa, and days later I was in the air to New York.
