Kazantzakis
In the early morning I would walk from my balcony near the
water to the market. I’d buy olives. There had to be dozens
of different kinds. Of al the food for sale, olives were the
cheapest, and I’d buy the cheapest of those - about an eighth
of an ounce - and then I’d find a cafe and order a cof ee. I’d
keep fil ing the cup with milk, each time changing the ratio of
cof ee to milk. I’d have the waiter bring more and more milk.
As long as there was stil some cof ee in the cup I couldn’t be
refused. This was a rule I made up in my mind, but it seemed
to hold true. Early on I stole a salt shaker so that I could clean
my teeth. Salt is abrasive, but it works.
I had read about the square where I took my coffee in
Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel
with me almost everywhere once I discovered it (and I stil
have that paperback copy, brown and brittle). A novelist who
captures the soul of a country or a people writes fiction and
history and mythology, and
It is the story of the 1889 revolt of the Cretans against the
Turks. It is epic and at the same time it is the story of
Heraklion, Crete’s largest city and where I was living. Inside
the epic there are love stories, stories of fraternal affection and
conflict, sickening details of war and occupation. In the square
- the square where I was sitting - the Turks would hang rebels,
the solitary body often more terrifying than any baker’s
dozen. Only a writer can show that precise thing, bring the
disfigured humanity of the dead individual into one’s own
viscera. One forgets the eloquence of the single person who
wanted freedom and got death. I could always see the body
hanging.
In those days political women did a kind of inner translating so that al the heroes, almost always men except for the occasional valiant female prostitute, were persons, ungendered, and one could aspire to be such a person. The point for the writer and other readers might well be masculinity itself,
but the political female read in a different pitch - the body
shaking the trees with its weight, obstructing both wind and
light, would be more lyrical, with the timbre in Bil ie Holiday’s
voice.
later, feminism brought those terms to a new maturity with
the idea that one had to be willing to die for freedom, yes, but
also willing to live for it. Each day over my prolonged cup of
coffee I would watch the body hanging in the square and
think about it, why the body was displayed in torment as if
the torture, the killing continued after death. I would feel the
fear it created in those who saw it. I would feel the necessity
