The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  Clea took us to the museum, where one magnificent statue, a life-sized bronze of a charioteer, was worth the entire climb up the hill. As for the rest I had some good historical sound bites for my growing collection.

  —The Oracle sat on this special kettle and said her prophecies.

  —Pericles had very big ears, which is why he is always shown wearing a helmet.

  On the way back to the ship, while the guide was telling the story of Oedipus—how he got his name, and killed his father, and married his mother, while frowning and somewhat shocked Seabourn passengers listened—I began to talk to the Cornacchias, Joe and Eileen, who told me about their recent win at the Kentucky Derby. It was the second time a horse of theirs had been triumphant—“Strike the Gold” had won in 1991, and “Go for Gin” this year.

  “What’s your secret?” I asked.

  “I have a very good trainer who knows horses. He feels their muscles. I also have a geneticist, who checks them out. It’s a science, you know.”

  The Cornacchias lived on the north shore of Long Island, some miles east of Gatsby country. Eileen was an admiring and pleasant person and Joe an unassuming man, who did not boast. He was also very big. “I tell the horses, ‘If you don’t win, I’m going to ride you.’ ”

  “What was the purse this year?”

  “I won eight-point-one million bucks. Broke even.”

  “Where’s the profit, then?”

  “ ‘Go for Gin’ is starting to make money as a stud.”

  Back on the ship, we resumed our voyage, and as the sun set behind Corinth we slid through the narrow Corinth Canal, with just a few feet to spare on either side. Jack Greenwald stood on deck in his blazer, smoking a thick Monte Cristo, waving to the Corinthians on shore.

  At the Seabourn dinners when black tie was requested, two or three a week, it was impossible to tell the waiters from the passengers. The night before we arrived in the port of Piraeus, a variety of caviar was served that reminded Jack Greenwald of something he had once eaten in the Arctic. This became a long story about narwhal tusks, “an area in which I am one of the few living specialists.”

  “I have two very important things to do in Athens,” Jack said to me on deck after dinner. “Make a phone call, and buy a captain’s hat. I want one of those real hats—not one with braid. And the phone call is about my cat.”

  “Yes?”

  “My cat is a diabetic,” he said. “We must have a medical update. Isn’t that right, Constance?”

  On the quay the next day I said that we would save money and time if we took the train the twenty miles or so from Piraeus to Athens. Good idea, he said, and waved away the taxi driver he had been speaking to. But on the way to the train station Jack became bored, and he turned around to see the taxi driver dogging our heels, still whining.

  “Please don’t say another word,” Jack said. “I will give you a hundred dollars if you stick with us all day.”

  That was fine with the taxi driver, whose name was Leonides. He took us to a jewelry shop. Jack: “Is that your cousin?” Leonides took us to a restaurant. Jack: “You have relatives everywhere.” Leonides had a blue eye on his key chain, a talisman against the evil eye. Jack: “You actually believe that stuff?”

  “I’m going to tell Leonides I’m in love with him,” Jack said. “Just see what he says.”

  In a wintry voice, Constance said, “Behave yourself.”

  “Tell me about your king,” Jack said.

  “King Constantine,” Leonides said. “Since one year he come to the Greek.”

  “Were you happy?”

  “Some not happy. Some people say, ‘Go!’ ”

  “Did you say ‘Go’?”

  “No. That is not good, sir.”

  “You know Jackie Kennedy?”

  “Mrs. Kennedy, sir. She married Mr. Onassis for the name, sir. For the name!”

  Jack turned to me and said, “When Kennedy died I had to take two numbers out of my revue Up Tempo. They mentioned him. They weren’t funny anymore.”

  We went to the Acropolis, but it was shut because of a strike by the municipal workers who staffed it. Still, it was possible to see the Parthenon, as white as though it had been carved from salt, glittering and elegant, and towering over the dismal city of congested traffic and badly made tenements. Apart from what remained of its ancient ruins, and the treasures in its museums, Athens had to be one of the ugliest cities on earth, indeed ugly and deranged enough to be used as the setting for yet another variation of the Heart of Darkness theme, perhaps to be called Acropolis Now.

  The Seabourn passengers we happened upon in the city were unanimous in sharing this view.

  “Athens is a four-hour city,” one man said, meaning that was all the time you needed to see it in its entirety. That hourly rate seemed to me a helpful index for judging cities.

  “I think Athens is a toilet,” a blunter man said.

  “There’s nothing to buy in Greece,” a woman said.

  While I bought lurid postcards of ancient pottery depicting bizarre sexual acts, Jack went to another jewelry store with Leonides. I found them later, being pursued by the owner.

  Hurrying into the taxi, Jack said, “When a jeweler tells you a stone costs a hundred and forty thousand dollars and then after some haggling says that he’ll give it to you for eighty thousand dollars—a discount of sixty grand—does that inspire confidence?”

  This brought forth a lesson in the form of a story from him in buying anything in the Middle East. This applied to Greece, Turkey, Iran, Israel, wherever one was possessed of a desire to spend.

  “What I am about to tell you is very valuable,” he said. But the story was complicated. It concerned his friend Ali who had sold him a carpet, then bought it back, and resold it, all at different prices.

  “What’s the point of the story?” he asked in a rhetorical way. It was this: Nothing in the Middle East has an absolute value. What a cousin is charged is different from what a stranger will be charged, and an old customer is told an altogether different price. There is no way of assigning a price to anything except by sizing up the buyer.

  New passengers had arrived on board and were audible as they got acquainted with the old ones.

  “—and then I’d be facing a two-hundred-thousand-dollar medical procedure.”

  “—so big it wouldn’t fit in the safe in the house, so we had to take out a separate policy.”

  “—on a scale of one to ten my brother-in-law is a minus four.”

  “—our tenth cruise in two years.”

  “—up the Amazon.”

  “—Antarctica.”

  “—Galapagos.”

  The ship sailed south to the Peloponnesian port of Nafplion, gateway to Mycenae. I had seen the Mycenaean gold masks and bracelets in the museum in Athens, and felt in need of a little exercise, so I stayed in Nafplion and climbed the thousand steps on the hill behind the town to visit the Fortress Palamidi. This brooding structure of eight bastions that dominates the skyline was pronounced impregnable by its Venetian architect Agostino Sagredo. But he had tempted fate, because a year after it was finished, 1715, the Turks landed in the Peloponnese and immediately captured it. About a hundred years later in 1822, the year of Lord Byron’s death, during the Greek struggle for independence, the Greeks wrested it from the Turks.

  At the top, a sign: Visitors are prayed to enter the site decently dressed. I knew this was another example of Greek puritanism and misplaced veneration. I asked the young man at the entrance to explain to me what it meant. He was unshaven, in a grubby shirt. He was playing cards with his much grubbier friend.

  “People come with bikinis and shorts. They don’t look nice,” he said.

  Oh, sure, Demetrios, and you look like Fred Astaire.

  Hiking farther on, outside town, I met a woman on the footpath and asked her whether there was a village that lay at the end of it. I apologized for not speaking Greek.

  “Don’t apologize,” she said. “I am
Italian.”

  So we spoke Italian. Her name was Estella.

  “What part of Italy are you from?”

  “I am from Uruguay,” she said, and added, “Let me tell you Uruguay is much cleaner and more orderly than Greece. Do you notice that Greeks throw paper and bottles all over the place?”

  The litter in Greece was remarkable—the roadsides, the beaches, even the ruins were scattered with plastic bottles and candy wrappers and rags and tin cans. I wondered why.

  “Because they are barbarians,” Estella said. “They are different from every other European.”

  “You don’t think Greece is modern?”

  “I have lived in Nafplion for three years. I can tell you it’s not pleasant. Greece is decades behind in every way. Twenty or thirty years behind the rest of Europe.”

  “I am just visiting. I saw the fort.”

  “The fort is like everything else here. Interesting, but dirty.” From a nearby hill I had a good view of Nafplion, the small old Venetian quarter, which was now just souvenir shops; the commercial part of the city, which had gone to seed; and the rest of it, ugly and recent and jerry-built and sprawling.

  More than any other place I had seen so far on the Mediterranean, Greece was purely a tourist destination, a theme park of shattered marble and broken statues, and garbled history. But tourists did not really go to Greece for the history; they went for the sunshine, and these cautioning signs were in many cases meant to restrain north Europeans who in the Greek warmth became militant nudists—Germans, especially. The Greeks struck me as being more xenophobic than the French, and more ill-tempered and irrational, in a country more backward than Croatia. They sneered at the Albanians and deported them. They loudly cursed the Turks. They boasted of their glorious past, but were selective, for it was only yesterday in the 1960s that these passionate democrats had welcomed a military coup, and supported them for creating one of the most right-wing governments in the hemisphere, the seven-year dictatorship of the Greek Colonels.

  Greece manufactured nothing except tourist souvenirs. It did not even clean its beaches of litter. It was famous for its pollution and its foul drinking water. Even its politics had become ridiculous, as its aging prime minister, famous for his moralistic rants, chucked his wife and ran off with an air hostess. But Greece had been redeemed. By being accepted as a member of the European Community, Greece had become respectable, even viable as a sort of welfare case. Membership meant free money, handouts, every commercial boondoggle imaginable; and the sort of pork that Italians had made into prosciutto the Greeks simply gobbled up, all the while keeping their Mediterranean enemies out of the European Community.

  As I walked over the hills above Nafplion the sky lowered and it began to rain, and the complaints of the grazing sheep grew louder. In sunshine, at a little distance, Greece could look delightful, because the arid glaring rock was so bright and backlit, the trash and garbage camouflaged, and even the most polluted parts of the Aegean had sparkle. The rain made it truly gloomy. In bad weather Greece was an awful place, of glum gray tenements and wrecked cars and rough treeless hills of solemn stone. Cloudy skies seemed also to throw the Greek dereliction into sharper relief—and so, to make matters worse, the sensational litter of Greece became visible in the rain.

  Given these tetchy people and this insubstantial landscape and the theme park culture, it was odd that Greece was thought of as a country of romance and robust passion and diaphanous rain. In a land of preposterous myths, the myth of Greece as a paradise of joy and abundance was surely the most preposterous. How had that come about?

  “The sea,” wrote Kazantzakis, rhapsodizing in Zorba the Greek, “autumn mildness, islands bathed in light, fine rain spreading a diaphanous veil over the immortal nakedness of Greece.” Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean Sea.

  “Many are the joys of this world—women, fruit, ideas. But to cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise. Nowhere else can one pass so easily and serenely from reality into dream. The frontiers dwindle, and from the masts of the most ancient ships spring branches and fruits. It is as if here in Greece necessity is the mother of miracles.”

  Dreamy, sentimental, passionate Kazantzakis, of the purple prose and the purple nose! His Greece, especially his native Crete, is mostly gone now and the paradox is that (if I may borrow an empurpled leaf from one of the master’s own books) it seems that Kazantzakis’s Oedipal feeling for his motherland produced the inevitable Greek tragedy. Tourists came in droves to verify Kazantzakis’s sensuous praise of the Greek sluttishness, and rumbunctiousness, and goodheartedness, the cheap food and the sunshine.

  The early visitors were not disappointed, but in the end Greece—so fragile, so infertile, so ill-prepared for another invasion—became blighted with, among nightmares of tourism, thousands of Zorba Discos, Zorba Tavernas, Zorba Cafes and the Zorba the Greek bouzouki music from the movie soundtrack played much too loudly in so many souvenir shops. All the curious, the fake icons, the glass beads, the t-shirts and carvings and plates (Souvenir of Mycenae); and regiments of marching Germans, resolutely looking for fun. Greece had needed a few metaphors. Kazantzakis provided the highbrow, or at least literary, metaphors; movies and television provided the rest.

  The Seabourn lay at anchor at the Greek port of Ágios Nikólaos (“Ag Nik” to its habitués). There were many Zorba businesses here, and the sign As seen on the BBC was displayed at various parts of town, for this place, specifically the nearby leper island of Spinalonga, was the setting for a popular and long-running series entitled “Who Pays the Ferryman.”

  “You didn’t see it?” a German said to me at a cafe in town. He was incredulous, and he mocked my ignorance. I was not offended. Since I spent many days mocking other people’s ignorance, this was fine with me. “When this show was on television in Germany, the streets were empty. Everyone was at home watching it. Me, too. That’s why I came here.”

  The port and the town and everything visible had been given over to tourists; there was not a shop nor any sign of human activity, nor any structure, that was not in some way related to the business of tourism. All the signs were repeated in four languages, German taking precedence.

  Writing about tourists—whether it is a harangue or an epitaph—is just pissing against the wind. There is a certain fun to be had from snapping the odd picture, or cherishing the random observation. But I had vowed at the beginning of my trip to avoid tourists and, whenever possible, not to notice them. Haven’t we read all that elsewhere? I went ashore, bumped into the Greenwalds (Jack: “I’ve just been offered a genuine Greek icon for fifty dollars. Think I should buy it?”), walked around a little, and finding the crowds of milling tourists much too dense, I rented a motorcycle and left Ágios Nikólaos at sixty kilometers an hour. I rode east, down the coast, then southward over the mountains to the opposite side of Crete, to the town of Ierápetra. This place looked very much like Ágios Nikólaos, which I had fled from: curio shops, tavernas, postcard shops, unreliable-looking restaurants, Rooms for Rent! Bikes for Hire!

  There were plenty of Zorba enterprises here, too. And bullying restaurateurs and their touts brayed at passersby at Ierápetra.

  “Meester—you come! You eat here! Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Best food in Griss! Where you go? Not some other place—you eat here!”

  Every five feet there was an insistent tout, hustling people off the pavement and seating them, before any competitor could snag them. There was probably a more unpleasant figure one could be assaulted by than an unshaven Greek howling commands at me in ungrammatical German, but if so I could not think of one at the moment. They were seriously browbeating the perambulating tourists—just the mood to whet your appetite; and when the people kept walking they were insulted and abused by the touts they had passed.

  All that and a foul beach, but the muddiest beach at Ierá
petra was called Waikiki, a misnomer that was merely a harmless desecration compared to the violence of calling a boardinghouse outside town The Ritz. Elsewhere in Ierápetra the eighteenth-century mosque in a quaint part of town had been wrecked and partly rebuilt. The minaret was still standing. The Arabic calligraphy remained. But the interior was defiled, having been turned into a tiny auditorium. Chairs had been set up, facing music stands, and the bass drum was propped against the wall.

  Was this worse than the Turks in Istanbul revamping the Byzantine magnificence of Santa Sophia’s and making it a mosque, along with any number of Christian churches? Probably not. But there were still Christians functioning in Turkey and there were no Muslims in Greece. Apart from the tourists and some retirees, there were no foreigners in Greece. There were Arabs in Spain, Albanians and Africans in Italy, Moroccans in Sardinia, Algerians in France; but there were no immigrants of any kind in Greece. The Albanians that came had been sent back. Whether it was Greece’s feeble economy that kept everyone except Albanians (whose economy was abysmal) from wishing to settle there, or Greek intolerance, was something I did not know. Perhaps it was both—or neither, since the Greeks were themselves migrants, leaving in great numbers for America and Australia.

  Was Crete the ancient homeland of the Jews? Tacitus thought so. His theory was inspired by the name of Crete’s highest mountain, in the central part of the island: “At the time when Saturn was driven from his throne by the violence of Jupiter, they abandoned their habitation and gained a settlement at the extremity of Libya. In support of this tradition, the etymology of the name is adduced as a proof. Mt. Ida, well known to fame, stands on the isle of Crete: the inhabitants are called Ideans; and the word by a barbarous corruption was changed afterwards to that of Judeans.”

  A Dutchman, Janwillem from Rotterdam, whom I met in Ierápetra, told me that he was here to look at buying a place for his retirement.