A/N: This is the complete poem by Giannis Ritsos that Nathan analyses in the last few chapters of the book.
Ritsos happens to be one of my favourite poets of all time and his work has always been a big inspiration - as I'm sure you can tell, if you've reached this far.
I really hope you enjoy it and hopefully, use it as an excuse to look into more of his poems but also the works of Greek writers, both ancient and modern, in general.
**
(She has returned, as every summer, from the strange dark region, to her large family home in the country--very pale, as if tired from the journey, as if sick from the great difference in climate, light, warmth. Something resembling a protective layer of protective shadow still concerns her face and hands. She lies stretched out on the old sofa, in a spacious, freshly whitewashed room, on the upper floor, with the shutters closed on the three windows and the balcony door. Even so, the glare of the Sun shines intensely on the walls in flickering strips of light. On the floor, a pile of baskets, full of wildflower, like those she didn't have time to take with her, then, on her first sudden journey. We may assume that, shortly before, her girlfriends had brought them to her as a welcoming gift. Now, only one young girl remains beside her, wearing a light blue dress, a blue ribbon in her hair--perhaps her most faithful, devoted friend, the water nymph Kyane. Next to the sofa, on a chair, a plate of cool water. Her friend, ever so often, moistens in it an embroidered batiste handkerchief, squeezes it, and places it gently on the traveler's forehead, covering her eyebrows. Now and then, a drop rolls slantwise down her cheek to wet the wide multicoloured pillow--almost as if she were crying with another's tears. And her hair is a little damp. Outside, one can barely hear the sea--calm, smooth--and sometimes a swimmer's voice. Then the Sunlight in the room intensifies. The traveler speaks):
It's true, I tell you--I was fine over there. I've grown used to it. It's here I can't bear it;
There's so much light--it makes me sick-- naked, harsh light; it reveals everything, conceals everything; it changes so often--you can't keep up; you change;
You sense time slipping away-- an endless, wearisome movement
Glasses shatter in the move, are left behind in the street, sparkle;
Some people jump ashore, others board the boats;--Just as when
our visitors came, went, and others came;
their big suitcases sat for a little while on the sidewalk--
a strange smell, strange places, strange names--the house was not our own;--
it too was a suitcase containing new underclothing,
unfamiliar to us--
Someone could pick it up from the leather handle and slip away.
We were glad then, certainly. A move then
seemed somehow to be a move upward;-- something was always happenin;
and for all that we feared that it would be lost, we did not yet know
the secret sally of the boat from the other side of the horizon
or from the swallow and the wild goose from the other side of the hill.
The glasses, plates, forks shown on the table,
golden and blue from the reflection of the sea. The tablecloth
white, well-ironed, was a shining plane; it had no creases at all in which other meanings, other conjectures could take refuge. Now
this light is unbearable--it distorts everything, it shows everything up
in its distortion; and the sound of the sea is wearisome, in its unstable boundlessness, its fleeting colours, it's changing moods. And these ridiculous boatmen
with their pants rolled up, soaking wet, getting angry at you;
and the swimmers, like coal merchants, daubed with sand,
laughing, apparently pleased, shouting only to be heard
as if their own voices were not enough.
Over there,
no one dives into the water, no one shouts. The tree rivers, ashen,disdainful, as they converge around the great rock make an altogether different noise--intense, uniform-- that fixed sound of eternal flux;--you get used to it; you almost don't hear it.
When my mother's brother first came to the house,
he was greyish like those rivers. He had taken ill suddenly.
They put him in the big bed; took him cupping-glasses (I believe he had caught a chill from the bright light and the heat);
--I remember his back,
dark-skinned, broad, powerful like a grassy pasture. We were afraid the hairs would catch fire--the candle was so near , the candle was white on the silver candlestick. Afterwards,
they set it on his marble wash stand. The room smelled of burnt cotton.
His clothing, still warm, was thrown on the chair. I watched the candle drip big drops of wax onto the marble.
My uncle caught my eye. I was ashamed. I wanted to run. I couldn't.
He had turned on his back; put on his undershirt;
and although his chest was dark and his shirt pure white
you still had the impression that an all black curtain had covered something very light and dangerous. So, my uncle, with the sheen pulled up to his chin,
smiled beautifully from out of his fever. Beneath the sheet
I could make out his two powerful feet, like roots. I left the room.
I didn't see him again that visit. I went back to the fields.
Three months later, he sent to mother, from a foreign land, a pile of his old clothes
for the poor. I recognised his body at once. They left one pair of pants for several days on a hanger in the corridor. I looked at them for hours at a time, touched them with my hands, I thought of stealing them, of hiding them under my bed, of putting them on. I was afraid.
One day, I stood a chair there, climbed up on it, buried my face in them and smelled them.
I fell off the chair. I was frightened. I wasn't hurt. The noise brought people running.
I didn't say anything. I felt no pain. Only a taste of deep sin.
They gave those pants to one of our servants.
They fit him perfectly. Servants (you will have noticed),
have a strange, idiosyncratic way about them, their own life, altogether apart,
Close and conspiratorial, despite all the mute devotion they show,
especially despite all their deference; something hostile and voracious in their eyes, on their lips, and above all, in their hands
strong, hard, adroit, self confident, heavy, coarse, like bear paws,
slow to obey, yet nevertheless so nimble, when they rubbed down the hoses,
harnessed the carriage or cut up an o, or nailed together a table or dug the garden--
My God, how slow witted, how ignorant--and they don't even know how handsome they are with their coarse, sweaty skin, absorbed in their work
amid hammers, nails, saws--and pile of tools with unknown names--terrifying in their usefulness,
terrifying in their secretiveness or rather their conspiring,
wood and complex ironwork, honed blades gleaming--
And they all have about them a heavy odor of still water and pine or milk or figs. They never unbuttoned in front of us, not even one shirt butto. They never laugh. But you know that left to themselves they go naked, joke, wrestle at summer noon times, in the rooms below. One day I saw them through the keyhole. One was asleep, stretched out on the bed;
The others silently stripped him, painted his member with soot, in stripes, like an erect snake.
He woke up; chased after them; they ran under the arches, around the columns, laughing
great guffaws of unforgettable laughter.
I was terrified. I took to my heels. My God,
Those stripes, light and dark in turn, like an endless vertical tunnel,
something closed and treacherous. I was suffocating. And I wanted to scream. I didn't scream.
I went up the stairs two by teo;--the staircase hummed, cool, shady, and outside I could hear the golden sunshine and the boatmen's voices,
far, far away and dark, like the hair in a male armpit. I was suffocating.
I ran upstairs, to the big room, opened the balcony door;
an odor of pitch and carob reached me, an odor of redness;
mother's dog was asleep in the shade of the big medlar tree
with its muzzle propped on its front paws. I shut the doors again.
Perhaps because of that I finally close the shade. Darkness is black--black, glossy, unchangeable without variations. You escape from the effort of making distinctions--but to what?
That servant was as though created from darkness. When he seized me--remember?--we were gathering flowers in a big meadow. Baskets full of crocuses, violets, lilies, roses, amaranth, hyacinths--I had bent over a strange flower--it was like a narcissus--a narcissus never before seen, with a hundred colours, with a hundred stalks; on it dew drops sparkled. And I was dazzled there,
bent over as if doubled within myself, as if leaning over a well, to see my form (almost self sufficient), I was in love with the rosy shadow on the edge of my lips,
with the fine skinned, ivory hollow between my breasts.
Above my back the Sunlight snapped like a flag;
it burned my hair; thousands of the most delicate stars twinkled, one on each strand of my hair, with five pointed colours. I saw them, in the cool water (or in that narcissus? I do not know), countless
they sparkled around my face, as if I had caught fire and wanted to fall into my watery image to quench the flames.
And suddenly I saw, rearing in front of my eyes, his two black horses as if blinded by the light (I saw them, too, in the water). I cried out, not from, fear but from wonder, as if I had suddenly taken in one leap all the stairs
down the servants' rooms; and I felt on my naked sole the splendid glissade of the lower hemisphere. I barely had time to see them fall into this chasm--your baskets of flowers, the garden fountain, the stone lion, the bronze tortoise.
I remember an austere internal density, and above it I heard you all calling my name;
And my name was strange; and my friends were strange; strange the upper light with the square, pure white houses, the fleshy, multicoloured fruits, pretentious and insolent, the delicate, greedy stoma of the corn. I wasn't afraid at all.
I scarcely felt the loss-- only at the edge of my lips which suddenly grew dry,--they could not shape sound or the articulation of sound,
only the distant, dark freedom, the meeting--
body with body--I and it--one inwardness with another--an incredible body.
And then I felt his arms coiled around my waist--rough, hairy, muscular--to overcome my resistance;--What resistance?--I was not I--no fear of humiliation, then; everything had become fixed in an infinite clarity of consummate impossibility.
"Are you afraid?" He said to me (how weak the most powerful are;--they are always afraid--perhaps we do not fear them as much as we should--the handsome ones, unsuspecting in their childish arrogance). "Yes," I told him, "I'm afraid," and he pressed me closer to him, so that I felt the hairs on his arm enter into my pores as if I were bound to his body by thousands of delicate roots--not confined at all, since I had been freed.
There, the houses are underground, the rivers underground, the sky underground, a few poplars only, ash-grey in the underground garden, black cypresses, sterile Willows, wild mint and some pomegranates.
He washed a pomegranate for me with his own hands. His fingers grew still blacker. The pomegranate seeds gleamed dazzlingly like glass phials filled with blood. He fed me from his palm amid the great jars and the stone stools, lest I forget and not return to him again. How could I not return?
This sea shakes its glitter at you, splinters of glass in your eyes, your mouth, your shirt, your sandals.
"Keep me,"--I said to him;--"Let me be only one--even half; the whole half (whichever it is), not two, separate and unmingled, for nothing is left in me but to be the cut--that is, not to be--only a vertical knife slash and pain to the core--" nor the knife will even be your own. "I can't resist," I said to him-- "Keep me."
He is the great, dark certainty--the only one. Always gloomy, with his heavy eyebrows concealing his eyes, so erect and yet as though stooped over, shut into himself, inside his hairiness, almost invisible, biting a leaf or smoking his clay pipe
and the small flame lights up his nostrils from below
like a far off flash of lighting in a deserted fleshly landscape,
and absorbent landscape;--it absorbed me.
On the blind wall of the Underworld two bronze rings were hung. They shone with a secret light, blackish green;---perhaps someone was stripped here
or some handsome young man strung up. I liked to see them--two holes to nowhere--I took my fill of them.
Remember that statue we stared at one afternoon in high school,
decorated with gold, silver, lead, bronze and tin,
painted a dark colour (now I realise how much it looked like him)-- I think it was Serapis--the work of Bryaxis the Athenian--ah, he knew a thing or two. We loved it, with the laurel wreath on its forehead,
so handsome , with a superb weariness diffused throughout the body
like the victor in the pentathlon who appears after the contests,
naked, just before he goes to the bath, in a close circle of his friends (Victors always have few friends or none).
He was standing somewhat at a loss in the midst of his victory, not knowing how to respond, obliging and unapproachable. Then a cloud, rosy, I think obscured the whole amphitheatre. His large thumbnail slowly widened (I watched but kept it to myself; I didn't tell you)
like an uncharitable shore, spilling over with the infinite melancholy of heroes. And there, on one bench, was an empty lemonade bottle, reflecting with apparent intimacy something rigorous and completed. It is strange, now, to speak and hear my voice. Before, I was afraid I would give myself away. Only to myself I said, repeated slowly, deeply his name. At night I would call to him silently "Nocturnal one, Nocturnal one," turned toward the wall.
How is it that they all came together, down there, under the low sky, where sometimes the sound of a bird pierces through?--the servant, the statue, my uncle--all silent, of flesh and shadow.
Here, an odor of warm resin and burning barley pursues you. Islands, scattered in the brightness of the sea, always have something to enhance you, take from you, or forbid you.
Here, the noon times ads like dead spas, congealed in light. A frenzied woman runs naked, crying out amid the whitewashed, locked up houses,
in the yellow air, and the sea shines like marble
with masts and motionless flags. The woman runs madly;--and now her passionate cry can be heard on the hill, and now the sound of her painting, here, outside the shutters.
Over there, nothing disturbs the silence. Only a dog (and he doesn't bark),
an ugly dog, his, dark with crooked teeth,
and two large ambiguous eyes, trusting and strange, dark like wells in which you cannot discern your face, your hands, or his face.
And yet you can distinguish the darkness, total, dense and transparent, complete, consoling, sinless. He pretends he doesn't see you but he smells everything, unerringly.
When I dream I suddenly feel his breath streaming under my chin or across my temples, as if to track my thoughts, fears, desires (and I, too, see them). I feel all my movements, even the quietest and most simple--when I comb my hair--when i wash--reverberate in the pool of his breathing
making endless circles down to that great depth,
as unfathomable as non being. Every word unspoken, every gesture postponed, goes into his own space, his own sovereignty,--he inhales them.
Sometimes, when I walk absent mindedly in the garden, beneath the poplars, or wash a shirt in the stone basin, or else my hand rest on my bosom, or hold a flower, with a solitary tenderness all my own,
I feel suddenly naked, nailed to the wall, or to the trunk of a tree, or the metal mirror at the entrance-- There above all, to the mirror, doubly nailed, doubly visible, with no hiding place, without a leaf, in a condensed transparency, illuminated from within and from without
by the two searchlights of his breathing, blasted from his narrow, suspicious nostrils, his prophetic, sensitive, sacred nostrils.
"Go away, go away," I told him once, nailed there, furious, in an indefinable guilt and innocence, not having anything more to hide--free in my weakness. Only my hair swarms over from here to there, enters, emerges from his nostrils, like roots perpetually in motion, casting light all around me like feathers and waves. I watched it. It gave me back a different pride--My own--an independence in the face of the dog and his master.
And besides from whom, and for whom, did he guard me? For his master, perhaps? For me? One evening, in the garden he jumped up and squeezed me at the waist with his front paws.
On my right thigh there remained something damp, tepid. Then I was afraid. And indeed the great snake stood erect before me, with its tongue out.
Perhaps, it was from that it guarded me? From whom and for whom, did he guard me?
The stain is still there, on my thigh, gleaming, milky, like new skin closing over a wound. Evacuation, maybe, or perhaps a tear? Dogs, too, weep;--I know it;--to that extent sometimes I pity him--when he looks at his ugliness in the river at evening, by moonlight; when, docile, he let me thread in his rough coat
flowering asphodel, daisies, mint;--so ridiculous in his clumsy servility--he takes on something of human weakness. But surely he too was once vanquished by man? They dragged him out into the light, they mocked him; a crowd of children and evil old men looking him over--right at midday,
right in the middle of the road--his dark muzzle, his crooked teeth, his dusty black coat, where one of my daisies still remained.
I don't want him banished.
He too is a companion;--always he lies in wait for me,
obliging me to lie in wait for myself, to find myself.
Up here, a jumble of voices and reflections, from opposite sides, summon you, divide you, like when we used to go to the stadium--remember? scorching afternoons, hot marble--it burned our feet! the benches were shimmering; we didn't know which one of all those naked bodies to single out! --an endless tension;
our eyes got huge, encircling our faces straining to see in a circle, around the bodies. They held the javelins poised;
One foot jerked in the air; the discus gleamed;
thousands of fling soles glittered; a chest dripping with sweat, panting, breasted the tape--you couldn't catch him.
We're never equal to our desires. Desire isn't enough. What remains is weariness, resignation-- a felicitous near loss of will, sweat, distraction, heat. Until, finally, night comes to erase everything, to mingle it with one solid, incorporeal body, your own,
to blow damp from the pinewoods or down from the sea, to submerge ourselves.
Outside the window you can hear the strolling violinist pass, the lame lamplighter,
those silent, slow wayfarers holding in their hands oak boxes tied with red bands and the others face down, striking the ground with both palms.
You can hear, too, the horses in the stale and the water falling, as the worshippers lift up two clay vessels, one to the east and one to the west, pouring hydromel or barley water infused with wild mint
over a grave with laurel, as they murmur ambiguous words, prayers and exorcisms. And mother's voice saying something about "Pure, golden grain, harvested in silence."
Nor does night refresh;-- an endless passageway, secretive, with monstrous states, painted curtains, masks, mirrors, optical illusions, metal objects, crystals, doors, rocks, one in darkess, the next in light,--the stairway the same, one step golden, the next black.
"Rend her," I said to him, and the three women always there, with rounded backs, with covered faces, bent over the empty well, speaking incomprehensible words; and the echoes multiplying their inexplicable voices from out of the well. I can't bear it here any longer.
The light is resurrection, death. Draw the curtains.
Vast, implacable, inimical summer. The Sun seizes you by the hair, dangles you over an abyss. Who of what defines me?
Does he? His dog? Mother? Each one for some purpose of his own which concerns me, and which I do not know.
Endless days. Darkness comes late. And night is like the day-- it doesn't hide you. The sea sparkles, brilliantly, even at midnight, rosy or golden green. The salt grinds, crusting the rocks. A boatman pisses into the sea from his caïque. The sound can be heard amid a muted groaning of hawsers tied to metal grapples--a tug of war between water and land in the same landing place. Above the shore the road runs between two rows of dusty olenaders.
A thorn trembles deeply in the field, like a column capital ready to fall. The whine of a mosquito shifts around the room giving erratic signals, describing swift thornbuses, exhausting your attention with acute and obtuse angles. The air smells strongly of resin and sperm. You can't breathe.
After midnight, footsteps are heard, perhaps the servants; someone tossing old iron castoffs at the far end of the garden. Little by little the nettles choke them--an aluminium plate, a spoon, a broken figurine, a zine table. With the beginning of autumn they appear again--the wheel, an oar, fhe tiller, that axle from the old fashioned wagon--things of memory, our own things, useless, ill treated, rusty, and yet almost round still, like buried jars or like stars.
Then comes a great silence--soft, gentle, moist, reaching beyond the garden to the peak of memory, as if autumn had suddenly arrived.
Somewhere, in the background, sharp blows can be heard, in distant woodworkers' shops, as of nailing long planed planks. The underclothes spread out in the dust of the courtyard are taking a long time to dry.
That's the time when hares come down to the road. Their eyes gleamed in the lights of the last wagons . A great stillness, level, spread out--you can't fold it;
one corner of it's moistened in the river, the second is lifted southward, out beyond, toward the sea, the third disappears in the island opposite, in the woods, the fourth in the moon with its yellow grasses.
Things are beautiful in autumn. I can breathe. The Sun loses its sovereignty, its terrible arrogance. Everything calms down; everything turns in on itself, so much that I think death is our own truest self. The western star rises higher, crystalline, translucent; it glitters auspiciously over the black words, like a tiny drop of the purest water, shining very near, as of pasted to the windowpane, yet at the same time infinitely far away,--a white gleam, a tear filtered, entirely clear, a self contained and joyful emptiness-- a silent, deep certainty of the end of the whole.
This is the time for me to return to his side, almost set free--
or rather to find freedom in his shadow. Draw the curtains. Look--a bee has settled, motionless, on my ring, still humming--do you hear it?--a sounding ring stone.
So, close the curtains. I can't bear it here any longer. The light pierces me with a thousand arrows, it blinds my eyes. I can't bear it. Draw the curtains, I tell you.
(Her friend does get up to draw the curtains. But she herself starts up from the sofa. Her damp handkerchief falls to the floor. See reaches the window in two steps, grasps the cord, and stands there, hand raised. Then, suddenly, she opens the shutters wide. She stays that way, in the blinding light, like a statue slowly coming to life. She moves her hand, gestures toward the outside. A boatful of young swimmers passes. They call out, greeting her. On the shore road, shimmering from the heat, a large black dog passes (maybe that one?) holding in its teeth a basket of multicoloured fruit. He looks vaguely toward the window, as if blind. A handsome, sunburnt swimmer, passing beside him, kicks him in the belly with his bare foot. The girl at the window laughs. The dog goes on his way. The young girl turns back in, rings the bell. A servant, with gray and black stripped pants, which fit him very well (perhaps her uncle's), appears at the door. "Set the table," she tells him. He goes away. The two friends open the balcony doors and the other two windows. The room is flooded with light. The flowers in the baskets smell sweet. The sounds of the sea are more clearly audible, mingled with the clatter of plates and cutlery below in the dining room. The damp handkerchief remains on the floor like a small, secretive white bird, tame, perhaps, and obedient. Little by little it dries and the dampness evaporates.
- Giannis Ritsos.
It has to be one of my favourite poems in the whole world and I can't begin to tell you how even though the English translation is nice enough it doesn't do it justice. It almost cheapens it a bit.
So, if you loved it like this, imagine how you'd adore it in its original form.
Isn't it incredible, though?
Until next time,
Theodorina.