by Mary Norris
The headlights were indeed not working, but I was so enchanted that I could not be too dismayed. I followed the white line as well as I could in the dimming light, and when night dropped its cloak of rich black velvet (hah!) and I found myself inching along a deserted industrial strip, I turned onto a side street and stopped in front of the first house with lights on. The family who lived there came out, and instead of trying to give me directions they all got in their car and escorted me to my hotel, the Dionysus. It had taken me five hours (with the stops to worship Apollo and Aphrodite) to drive forty miles.
After two nights on boats, I luxuriated in the private bath at the Hotel Dionysus. Then I went out for something to eat. Bouzouki music was coming from a restaurant. The bouzouki, or its predecessor the lyre, was said to have been fashioned by Hermes from a tortoiseshell and strung with sheep guts. It has a distinctive twanging sound, more exotic than a guitar. The owner of the restaurant was standing outside, as restaurant barkers do, and invited me in. He was very attentive, offering me an aperitif of Cypriot brandy and serving me a perfect meal: a salad of chopped cabbage and green tomatoes, swordfish souvlaki, French fries, and white wine. Any pub will give you a wedge of lemon with your fish and chips, but this plate came with an entire sliced lemon, which the owner showed me how to squeeze over everything, potatoes and all. Cyprus is rich in lemons.
Also in the restaurant were a few couples from England and Wales, the fisherman who supplied the restaurant (his son was playing the bouzouki), and two swarthy guys who had been out on the fishing boat, one of whom started to flirt with me but was suppressed by the owner.
“How long have you been in Paphos?” the Englishman asked.
“About an hour,” I said.
“How long are you staying?”
“I’m leaving in the morning.” He and his wife were there for two weeks. I have always been the kind of traveler who has to see everything within a five-hundred-mile radius. I had three days to see as much of Cyprus as possible before getting back to Limassol and catching a boat to Rhodes in time to connect with a smaller boat that left once a week, on Mondays, for ports in the Dodecanese. Maybe someday I would mature into the other kind of traveler, who stays in one place and soaks it up. Not today.
One of the fishermen joined me at my table, over the protests of the owner, and gave me some practice in Greek. Speaking very slowly, as if to a four-year-old, he told me his name was Andreas. I knew the word for “lights”—phóta, from phos (φως), as in phosphorus, the light-bearing element—and turned out to be quite fluent on the subject of broken headlights. He called over his friend, Grigori, who happened to be a mechanic. They offered to have a look at the car, and if they couldn’t fix τα φώτα that night, I could bring the car to Grigori’s garage in the morning. I told them I planned to drive to Nicosia, and they corrected me—Greek Cypriots refer to the capital as Lefkosia—and tried to discourage me. Why would anyone want to go to Lefkosia? It was a mess. The Turks, in occupying the north of the island from Morphou to Famagusta, had taken the best lemons. Grigori was from Famagusta, and if he wanted to visit his family he had to go first to Constantinople and then to Ankara to get permission. As a foreigner, I could visit the Turkish sector if I wanted to—Salamis was very beautiful, they said—but I had to be sure and get back before dark. “Why?” I asked. I wanted to get my headlights fixed, in case of emergency, but I did not plan on doing any night driving. “No one saves the bodies,” Andreas said.
After dinner, Andreas and Grigori walked me to my car, parked outside the Hotel Dionysus. They determined that the light switch was broken and gave me directions to the garage. I said good night and went into the hotel lobby, which was modern with fluorescent lights glaring off a tiled floor. A man seated in a chair rose up and approached me. It was the restaurant owner. He seemed to think I had agreed to meet him. He was a thin man with dark hair and glittery eyes. Andreas and Grigori had warned me about him. His restaurant was struggling, they said, and his wife had all the money. But what did he want with me? There was no one else in the lobby, no clerk at the reception desk. He took me by the elbow. “One kiss,” he said, leaning in. I had heard this before. “One kiss” was what Mimi had said in Crete as he steered me into the cave of the Minotaur. “One kiss” was what the able-bodied seaman had said on the boat from Crete to Rhodes. I knew what “one kiss” meant. It was meant to unlock the whole apparatus. I backed away from him and ran down the hall. As I opened the door to my room, he stood there, arms at his sides, and called imploringly, as if we were breaking up after a torrid affair, “Like this? Like this?”
MEN . . . WHY DID I WANT ONE? Did I want one? For the past year, I’d been on a self-improvement kick, hoping to eliminate anything that might prevent me from attracting a man. I was determined to beautify myself from the inside out. I’d made a list of doctors to consult: an otorhinolaryngologist for my ears (ota), nose (rhino), and throat (larynx); a throat doctor who specialized in singers to address my chronic hoarseness; an optometrist, from whom all I wanted was an updated prescription so that I could get new sunglasses for my trip to Greece and from whom instead I got a glaucoma scare and a diagnosis of “convergence deficiency,” which basically meant that, as a proofreader, I was in the wrong line of work. The dentist and the gynecologist competed for last and most-dreaded doctor on the list, and the gynecologist won.
The OB-GYN was Greek, which pleased me, though I didn’t like his looks. He was short with a square head and bristly black hair. His wife worked with him, while their son, who had his father’s bear-bristle hair, did his homework in the waiting room. This was a family weirdly at home in the world of female genitalia.
The word “gynecologist” is from the ancient Greek γυνή, pronounced (in the vocative) “goon-eye.” It is what Jerry Lewis would yell in Greek instead of “Hey, lady!” The word has settled into modern Greek as γυναίκα (“yee-neck-ah”), a slipperier, more lip-smacking word. Traveling in Greece with this etymological burden, I felt as if Greek men saw nothing of my face or eyes or hair but, like the gynecologist, zoomed in on the goon-eye.
“You will feel a slight pinch,” the gynecologist said as he examined me. I sank my teeth into the meaty part of my hand below the thumb. He asked about my “sexual relations” and I told him I had none: I was celibate. (I had a crush on someone who was not interested in me and I was biding my time till I was worthy.) A friend had confided that when she told her gynecologist she was celibate he insisted that she was a lesbian. “He started to ask about birth control,” she said, incredulously, “and then stopped himself, saying, ‘But you won’t need birth control, as you’re lesbian.’ ” Later, in his office, the Greek gynecologist said, “I find you in good health.” Then, snapping a rubber band around a brown medicine bottle that contained my cervical cells, he asked inquisitively, “You have no relations?” “Yes,” I answered brightly. “I have a brother.”
I also had a psychotherapist, to whom I reported this howler. The first diagnosis I ever received from a shrink (you had to have a diagnosis to collect on the insurance) was dysthymia. Unable to find it in the dictionary, I teased it apart by its roots: dys, the opposite of eu, meant something bad, as in “dystopia,” a bad place. For thymia, I remembered that in the Iliad, when a warrior was defeated in battle, he felt it in his thymós. The θυμός was the seat of the passions, which the Greeks located somewhere in the chest. (In English, the gland called the thymus is in the throat.) It means spirit, soul, heart, anger. A diagnosis of dysthymia meant I was downhearted. Was there a cure for that?
The shrink followed my medical adventures with some skepticism. She thought that my ears-nose-throat-voice-eyes-teeth problems were all “displacement,” and that what really wor ried me was my genitalia. I had trouble finding the female body beautiful. We had a running battle in which I maintained that my shame about my body was all my mother’s fault. Motormouth Mom was one of seven children, six girls and one boy. “He wanted a boy in the worst way, and he k
ept on getting girls,” she would say of her father. “Finally, on the sixth try, he got a boy, and he says to my mother, he says he says he says, ‘This one’s mine—you take care of the rest.’ ”
What I absorbed from this, and from the way my mother seemed to favor my brothers, was that a girl was worthless except for helping around the house. We were slaves to Ajax and the skoupa and the heraklean clothesline. I was obviously jealous, but I insisted to the shrink that I did not suffer from penis envy. The only thing I envied was the male’s ability to pee standing up. Then came a pivotal session. We were talking about hospitals, because my father, in Cleveland, was having surgery for an aortic aneurism. The shrink believed that I was afraid of hospitals because I associated them with being castrated. “But nothing ever happened to my ba—” I was halfway through that last word—balls—when I realized I had misspoken.
“Touché!” the shrink’s look said. I had refused to admit to penis envy, that Freudian cliché, but now it seemed I had something worse, a strain of penis envy of cosmic proportions. The shrink had brought me around to seeing that I had somehow cultivated a fantasy that I’d been born male and castrated at birth, a fantasy intended to shore up my worth in my own eyes. I thought all females were mutilated, made wrong, damaged, monstrous.
In mythology, it would be nothing to have someone take a sickle to your balls and scatter your seed all over creation, as Kronos did to Uranus, giving rise to foam-born Aphrodite. But in real life these cases are rare, especially among females. Preposterous as it sounds, the shrink’s interpretation explained a lot. Once, I heard my father, coming in out of the cold on a winter night, say to my mother, “I almost froze my balls off.” I tried using that expression—I was pretty sure I had balls; they were just round things, right?—and my mother burst out laughing. Another time, I was zipping my pants and my mother mocked me, saying, “You did that just like a boy.” She demonstrated by grabbing a wad of fabric at the front of her housedress and zipping up an imaginary fly. Mom was busting my balls.
I went from seeing a psychotherapist once a week to undergoing a full-blown Freudian analysis, fifty minutes a day, five days a week, for years, using up two lifetimes’ worth of mental-health benefits from my generous employer. I used to arrive at work with bits of Kleenex stuck to my eyelashes. Gradually, I saw that it wasn’t really my mother’s fault—she and I had just missed. Sadness was deeper than anger, and under sadness was love. Finally, one spring day, having gone swimming after a Greek class, I was sitting outside on the Columbia campus, balancing my checkbook and eating a hard-boiled egg, and I looked at the name printed on my checks: it was a combina tion of my grandmother’s first name, Mary, and my father’s last name, Norris. It was a feminine name, and it was my name (and my money in the bank), and suddenly it came to me that there was nothing wrong with me. I was not a mutilated male but an intact female, like half the human race.
I COULD NOT LEAVE PAPHOS without seeing the Roman mosaics. First thing in the morning, I checked out of the Hotel Dionysus and found my way to the “archaeological park”—a sort of theme park for students of ancient art history. The Romans who lived here two millennia ago paved their floors with stone mosaics, hundreds of small squares of colored stone—tesserae—arranged in scenes from mythology, embellished with vignettes from the natural world. The dig was ongoing, and the archaeologists were still trying to figure out the best way to display what they had uncovered, without resorting to Plexiglas. Visitors stood on a sort of catwalk that formed a grid some three feet above the floors of the homes of the rich and famous in a neighborhood dating to the second century AD, and peered down into their living rooms. The mosaics were dusty but well preserved: stone, if not quite eternal, is a lot more lasting than anything else on the planet. A splash of water would bring out the colors: soft burgundy, warm yellow, creamy white, rich gray, smooth black.
The floors were like tapestries made of stone. There was an astonishing variety of scenes: Theseus, the legendary king of Athens, who slew the Minotaur; Orpheus, the doomed musician, plucking his lyre; Dionysus, the god of booze, sprawled on the back of a leopard, his name spelled out in stones. The Greek letter sigma (Σ) looked like a “C” in ΔIONYCOC. I thought it was Latin, but it’s something called a lunate (moonlike) sigma. All the corners were decorated with flowers and animals: oxen, lions, fish, birds, the peacock associated with Hera. The images were framed with different patterns: waves or checks or the Greek key motif.
I had never thought about mosaic art before, but here was something practical (a floor), enduring (stone), beautiful, and orderly (the check pattern may have come from tesserated stone), and it aroused in me what I suppose is a naive response to art: desire. I wanted it. As Samuel Johnson said of Greek and lace, I wanted as much of it as I could get.
I left the mosaics all too soon and reported to the garage where my new friends Andreas and Grigori were waiting to fix my headlights so I could press on in search of Aphrodite and her baths. First we had Cokes; then we had a shot of Finnish vodka; then we had another shot of Finnish vodka (“for the other leg,” Andreas said). I protested that I shouldn’t drink and drive, but I needn’t have worried: I would not be back in the driver’s seat for hours. Grigori ordered a new switch for the car. Then he showed me a Citroën that he had totaled and was using for parts. He also had a Jeep, an American model from the thirties, in mint condition. He found a broken red triangle in his toolbox and repaired it. Meanwhile, Andreas pressed me to stay in Paphos: we could all go for a ride in the Jeep, and they would take me fishing. The new switch came, but it had to be converted (whatever that meant). Grigori disappeared, and Andreas, with his thick black hair and lush mustache, plied me with Greek, ever so slowly. He said it was raining in the Troodos, the mountains I would have to drive through to get to Lefkosia. He had never heard of the Baths of Aphrodite. I asked what he was doing that afternoon. I was just curious—surely he didn’t spend every day chatting up tourists in his friend’s garage—but he thought I was inviting him to come along. So I had to rescind an invitation that I hadn’t consciously extended. I told him no one understood why I was traveling alone, and before I could embark on my high-flown feminist ideals he said “Oúte”—“Neither do I.”
I did not have the facility in Greek to express this to Andreas, but if I hadn’t been traveling alone we wouldn’t have been talking together like this. When you travel alone, you are forced to engage with people. Otherwise, you’re stuck with whatever random song was running in your head when you woke up—the theme from “Mister Ed,” say, or “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” When you’re with someone from home, it is too easy to stay comfortable, in your own idiom and daily regimen and character. You never have the feeling of alienation that is so formative to an experience in a strange place. Living in Greek was a relief from my interior monologue. Because my Greek was limited, I concentrated on saying only things that were direct and essential. There was no place for small talk. Back at home, I was terrible at small talk. In the Mediterranean, no one knew that. I could make myself up as I went along.
If there was a drawback to traveling solo, it was eating alone in restaurants. A single woman needs to be very self-possessed to command a good table in a restaurant. But the upside of that was that I could skip dinner if I wanted and subsist on yogurt and oranges. I could be selfish. I didn’t have to consider how my decisions would affect anyone else. I could indulge my penchant for detours. I could slow down if I wanted—and every proposition from a man, like this one from Andreas and Grigori, to skip Aphrodite and go fishing on the sea instead of bathing in it, tempted me. But there was no reason to let anyone keep me from satisfying my own desires. Traveling alone was the only way I knew to go exactly where I wanted to go without having someone try to talk me out of it. I was no one’s slave. Life was about my next bed and my next ship and my next city or my next beach. Next! A beautiful word. For heightened pleasure, I would sometimes think of life going on at the office without me, o
f someone (not me) reading the endless columns of small print. I gloated.
Once in a while the perfect word would come to me spontaneously, and it did so with Andreas in the garage. I told him I was ανυπόμονη (anypómoni). Impatient.
When the lights were fixed at last, and I had paid Grigori—the car-rental agency would reimburse me later—and we three had drunk one last coffee together, I gave them both a chaste kiss goodbye and headed north.
It wasn’t long before I realized I had left Paphos without getting gas. I now understood that I wasn’t traveling on Pennsylvania’s I-80, but I still expected to see tall Mobil signs in the distance. In a hilltop village I stopped and used my Greek to ask a man who was walking down the street, “Where can I buy gas?” (I’d practiced.) He got in the car and directed me to the kafeneíon—the coffeehouse—whose patrons came out to give me directions and ended up forming a phalanx around the car and escorting me, on foot, to the garage, while I drove slowly, as if on parade. Instead of in underground tanks with a pump, the gasoline was stored in cans that came in two sizes, small and large. I picked the large one, the proprietor poured it into my tank, I paid in lira, and the men of the village whose coffee I had interrupted all waved goodbye as I pulled back onto the road.
