Dinner with Persephone (47 page)

For Penelope, another ordeal remained: she had grown up with an ideal of heroism, of facing danger for the sake of Hellenism, and as a woman, her equivalent of that heroism was to expose herself to the contempt of or even rejection by her future husband by a wrenching confession to him that she had loved another man, that she was not, in a sense, an emotional virgin, as she was expected to be. Perhaps, in part, too, she harbored a hope that the confession would free her from a marriage about which she had mixed feelings. After the initial confession, she brought up the subject so often that it also seems she might have made use of it as a way of expressing a rebellion against a marriage she didn’t really want, even as a subtle and impersonal way of punishing the groom for not being the man she loved.

After Delta listened to her confession, he asked her if she had ever kissed the man she had been in love with, and she swore on God that she had not. Then it was possible for him to continue the engagement, he concluded, and asked her to kiss him. For Penelope, the first kiss was a wound, a repulsive obligation to a man to whom she was not attracted and did not love. It was a bizarre discovery for a sheltered and virginal young woman to make, that marriage itself could make prostitutes of women who would have consented to burn to death for the sake of morality.

Delta asked her for the details of her history with the other man, anxious to learn why her parents had forbidden the marriage. She said they had objected because of her emotional involvement with her suitor, and because he was poor. Delta told her frankly that he was poor, too, a shocking discovery for Penelope, since her parents had objected so strongly to Mavrocordatos on the ground that he had no money. Now it seemed that they were more than willing to accept her marriage to a poor man, as long as it was a poor man she didn’t love. “The condition that they so feared several months before, today they accept because I don’t love Mr. Delta,” was the only conclusion she could draw.

Now that Stefanos and Penelope were committed, they were caught up in a strange charade, an engaged couple who had to impersonate an engaged couple. Now at their meetings, it would be almost impolite, ungenerous for Stefanos not to say he loved her, and she was obliged to reciprocate, to follow the dialogue written for her role as he recited his. As her future husband, he now had the right to read her diary, so she could not be sincere even in her private hours, until other matters preoccupied him and his interest in reading her journal waned. The engaged couple now sat next to each other at family meals, and went for lightly chaperoned walks along the quay at Phaleron, then a fashionable seaside resort near Athens, where there were theaters and opera, and respectable hotels, where the great Alexandrian Greek poet Cavafy stayed on his first visit to Greece. These meetings and walks were the foundation of the couple’s personal knowledge of each other. On one stroll, Penelope wanted to know whether, if she offended Stefanos after they were married, he would be capable of beating her or killing her. “To kill you, yes, perhaps,” he answered, “to beat you, never.” This reply, she said, pleased her.

Penelope was determined to be impeccable in playing the devoted, affectionate fiancée as she was in any other matter of etiquette, resolved not to show any hint of hesitation, distaste, or ambivalence; she played the role of the bride-to-be charmed by her future husband so perfectly that her father again began to make jealous scenes, insisting that her absorption in Stefanos was coarse and rude, and their displays of affection for each other vulgar. It was a painful irony for Penelope to be attacked for efforts she was making partly to make her fiancé happy and partly to please her father, to demonstrate publicly that she embraced the future he had chosen for her. His displeasure with the couple’s unseemly affection and her mother’s fury with their selfish happiness continued even during Penelope’s wedding day; as the bride dressed, she made a solemn vow to herself that if she ever had a daughter she would do all that was humanly possible to keep her from marrying as her mother was marrying.

The couple went to a hotel a bit outside of Alexandria for their honeymoon. Penelope faced her wedding night not only with the terror of an ignorant virgin, but with the despair of a young woman who knows that for all her life, she will never make love with a man she desires, or one she loves. When her husband left her alone to prepare herself, she undressed hurriedly, dove under the covers, and, hidden under the veils of the mosquito netting, put her face into her hands and began to pray.

Her married life was a lie, she recorded in her journal; her great success was in creating a kind of wax tableau of marriage, giving her husband the lifelike illusion of domestic content that was his preferred image and cherished hope. She worked to protect her parents too, from any public hint that she might be unhappy with the life they had chosen for her. Ironically, Penelope’s public cheerfulness provoked her mother to say she was scandalized to see how quickly Penelope had fallen in love with her husband, while her father continued to lash out at her, saying public displays of affection between spouses disgusted him. When Penelope arrived in Athens, far from being mistress of her own household, she was subject to the mother-in-law, whose existence had been so unexpectedly revealed. They were to share the household for ten years, while she incessantly questioned the quality of Penelope’s housekeeping, undermined her management of the house, and eventually, interfered with Penelope’s rearing of her daughters. Delta, although Penelope described him as exceptionally kind, does not seem to have offered much in the way of companionship, coming home after work to read a newspaper, eat dinner, and fall asleep, determinedly oblivious to any household friction. For Penelope, it was a life of ashen joylessness, of struggling to accomplish meaningless work, of keeping her temper in the face of petty daily malice. Having children, although she had read about the great fulfillment of maternal love, the mother instinct, the miracle of maternal tenderness, was not the perfect consummation that the ideology of motherhood had led her to believe. Motherhood was work and caretaking—not
companionship, adult affection and conversation, intellectual and moral dialogue, principled tenderness. For Penelope, who had never experienced adult love, the always unequal love of parent and child could never be adequate by itself. Only a profound adult companionship in work and in love could sustain her. She had never been loved as a child, never experienced her own childhood, but had been a symbol of her parents’ parenthood, an architectural element of their dynasty, like the marble caryatids that sustain classical buildings. As a parent, she was again a symbolic figure, this time for her children, but inevitably not fully herself, not acknowledged and thinking freely in a way that is possible in an adult companionship but not between young children and parents. Motherhood was rewarding in many ways, she reflected, but it could not alter her emotional and intellectual starvation. She privately debated which was more tortuous, to watch love die in a marriage of choice, or to have one’s capacity for love extinguished through a business marriage. She was painfully depressed, and dreamed of suicide, hating herself for hating her life. True to her family’s values, she felt a ruthless contempt for herself. “My god,” she wrote, “how repulsive sick people are … myself among them … The world should be cleansed of them … if all the sick people would have the courage to plant a bullet in their heads, the world would get on much better.”

In 1905, almost miraculously, after the Deltas and their children had moved to Alexandria so that Stefanos could take up a position in the Benaki firm, Penelope met a man almost uncannily her match. She had been told by the fortune-teller in Switzerland that her life would hold little joy, but in retrospect, she annotated her record of the prediction with a correction: she had known one great joy in her life, she commented, referring to Ion Dragoumis. A diplomat, ardent Hellenist, parliamentarian, the young Dragoumis, attached to the Greek consulate at Alexandria, was to become one of the most fascinating figures of modern Greece. His multivolumed journals, written from 1895 when he was a Cherubino living in Constantinople
through 1920 when, in his early forties, he was murdered, prove him to be one of the rare great diarists of the twentieth century. For his sensuous still-life descriptions of domestic scenes and city vignettes, he might be compared to Virginia Woolf; but as an urbane Greek, Constantinopolitan, and European, he moves dizzyingly between worlds as the reclusive British writer did not. The diaries also support his reputation as a fascinating personality and a desirable lover, even more than the photographs of his finely planed, expressively ironic face, rich dark eyes, and elegant body; they show him to have been a man with that most erotic of all qualities, a capacity for sustained concentration, evident from his earnest schoolboy annotated lists of favorite music and books, to a detailed description of two little girls playing on the beach that he watched one day during his final political exile on the island of Skopelos.

Like Penelope, he loved the Parthenon, almost as if it were a human presence, writing about how much he loved to sit on a rock on its site, lose himself in thought, and look up to find it near him. And like Penelope, he was an ardent cultural pioneer, in his efforts to create a Greek nation. He was brother-in-law of a famous guerrilla leader in Macedonia, Pavlos Melas, who was killed the year before Dragoumis met Penelope, and whose image is as famous in Greece as Davy Crockett’s is in the United States. Dragoumis’s influence on Penelope is palpable in her children’s books, both in their frequent preoccupation with Macedonia and in her choice to write in demotic Greek. The year Dragoumis and Penelope met in Alexandria, a controversial translation of the
Oresteia
, which they must both have seen, was presented at a theater in Alexandria, with Electra played by Marika Kotopouli, who was to become one of the great figures of the modern Greek theater both as an artist and as a master teacher. The struggle between the champions of demotic Greek and Katharevousa was at one of its heights—the translation of the Aeschylus plays performed in Alexandria was by a man named Soteriades, and two years earlier its alleged vulgarization of the
Greek heritage had so enraged a professor at the University of Athens that he led his students in a demonstration that turned violent, during which a spectator was killed. The Greek government in response banned further performances of the translated plays, agreeing with the professor and his party that demotic Greek was a sacrilege against the Greek heritage, and that its use even violated national interests. Still, there was a story reported in the newspapers that even this virulent champion of Katharevousa slipped into demotic at the bedside of his sick daughter.

For Dragoumis and for Delta, and for their circle, the choice of demotic was the choice of the Greek language as it had actually developed, reflecting the history of the language and the people; Katharevousa represented an idealized version of that history, like a studio photograph instead of a candid shot, of Greek without Turkish, even without Latin, a dream of how fifth-century Greeks might speak if they had also had the New Testament and were alive now—the speech of statues wearing crosses. Katharevousa was itself a fascinating creation. But for the demoticists, to commit to Katharevousa would mean that the nation and its future literature would be trapped forever in a dream of being Greek. Until she met Dragoumis, Penelope had written her diaries in French, but after her meeting with him she began to write wholly in Greek, becoming the only woman member of the circle of demoticists who labored to bring modern Greek literature into being.

It is hard to chart the progress or much of the nature of Ion and Penelope’s affair. It seems the intensity of their feeling for each other and their appetite for each other’s companionship was open enough for the Benakis to send the Delta family away from Alexandria to Frankfort, ostensibly to set up a new branch office there. When Dragoumis eventually showed up in Frankfort, the Benakis descended on Penelope in full force, with all the intimate psychological lacerations and threats with which they had managed her before, and they succeeded in destroying any hope she had of making a life with Dragoumis. A curse runs through certain Greek fairy
tales: if the hero reveals certain secrets or exposes an evildoer, each time he makes the effort some part of his body will be turned to marble, his feet, then his knees, then his chest, until finally he becomes a statue. Penelope after the loss of Dragoumis, like one of those fairy-tale characters, seemed to be marble up to her neck. What was left her was speech, and she began to consider what she most wanted to write and publish. She wrote to the poet Palamas in 1909 about the nearly total absence of Greek children’s books. Greek children read mostly books written for children in other countries, and there was little literature that reflected their own lives, their environment, the manners of the world they lived in. In a sense, then, even Greek children who could read were illiterate, without a literature that reflected their own experiences. Part of the enchantment of Penelope’s work is exactly this invaluable glimpse of Greek manners and Greek domestic life—at their best her children’s books have a miraculous freshness that reflects the delight and relief of speaking in your own tongue for the first time, the creativity of naming. Penelope was never at home in her parental family or in her marriage; her homecoming was to the house of Greek culture, helping to sustain and create it, and the best of her writing reflects the joyousness of that homecoming. She and her family eventually moved to Kifissia, then a leafy suburb of Athens filled with unpretentiously elegant villas, although it now looks like California, all shopping malls and “luxury” homes with elaborate security systems. The rest of Penelope’s life was spent there, writing her books: historical novels for children, a life of Christ,
Trelantonis, Fairy Tale Without a Name
, and
Mangas
, a sort of
apologia pro vita sua
written by a dog. Her mother apparently never read any of Penelope’s books, not even the life of Christ, which was dedicated to her.