“Gabrielle, where are you going,” Ambrosia shouted after me. “I’ll be right back,” I cried over my shoulder, trying to throw them off, if only for a moment. As I reached the boulevard, fate must have been with me, for a taxi driver spotted me, started up his cab and pulled alongside. In an instant, I was inside.
“Ephthiaine! Straight ahead, please!” My Greek was fragmented, but it worked. I guess the tone of my voice was frantic enough, because he took off like a bullet just as Antonio came running up. “Come back,” he shouted, and involuntarily I turned to look back, loving and fearing him at the same time, heartbroken. But what I saw, just for an instant, was enough to make me sure I’d made the right decision, the bearded visage and long tangled hair, the longing in his eyes, the long wooden rod he held out toward me. What was real, what was hallucinatory - I didn’t care any more. I had seen enough. The driver had left the docks behind now, and I kept giving him right turns and left turns to make until we had reached quieter streets rising into the hills.
“Stop here!” I finally said, and stepped out. “Just a moment please.” From that spot on a narrow road that skirted the hillside high above Naxos, I could scan that whole side of the island. Off to my left…there it was, and not far away. The airport! If I was lucky, I could buy a ticket to Athens and from there to, well, wherever. I jumped back into the cab, instructed the driver, and in another 30 minutes I had paid him and entered the terminal, yes, with just the clothes on my back, but lacking nothing that wasn’t pretty easily replaceable. Even better, there was a flight to Athens with a seat in less than an hour. It made me feel I must be moving in the right direction. But as I turned away from the ticket counter, there he was before me – Antonio! – just a few feet away. My heart stopped. And broke. Yet I was afraid of him.
“I thought I will find you here,” he said. “You must explain! My darling, what are you doing?”
My head started to spin. I began to babble.
“I can’t explain, Antonio, not here, not right now. I… I was going to contact you. You must be thinking that…oh, look, I can get you a ticket right now, let’s get out of here. Let’s put this craziness behind us!”
“Well, I don’t know. You see…”
“You don’t know?”
“It’s confused situation. Petros is talking to me this afternoon, making me offer. Big offer. I don’t like you are always paying for everything. Don’t you know?”
“What kind of offer, exactly?” I asked, knowing the answer in my heart.
“It’s same job as others. It’s…”
“It’s being a male prostitute! And you expected me to…what?”
“No, it’s not that, what you say! They are spiritual too, no? They are adventurers! Don’t you remember? They say ‘love and freedom’ to us.”
To “us?” In less than three weeks, my entire world had come crashing down around me. How could this be happening?
Suddenly, I decided: I wasn’t going to stand for it. Something inside me clicked. I turned back to the counter and told the woman I wanted another ticket. She’d heard our exchange, or at least sensed the tension between us. She looked concerned, but dutifully punched her computer’s keys and generated another ticket. Then she wanted Antonio’s passport.
“Give me your passport,” I said, staring implacably into his eyes. And he blinked. I felt something break inside him. In the same instant, that vision of the bearded figure reappeared before me, loomed up and then like a cloud born on the wind dissolved into nothingness. Antonio reached into his backpack and got out his passport. The woman behind the counter completed the transaction and I paid with my card. Then I almost dragged the man that was supposed to be my lifetime lover, my husband, through the departure gates. My whole being was focused on reasserting control over who I was and who we were supposed to be. He made no attempt to resist me, but after we were finally seated (together!) he turned to look at me with an odd smile on his face.
“OK, Gabrielle, you win. I do love you so. But…”
“But what?”
“Oh, never mind. Maybe later.”
In any other situation I’d have written him off as a manipulative, chauvinistic nutcase. Now, in the midst of my control trip, I began to sense I was being controlled. In my addled brain there was so much more going on. My body was trembling. We were still on the tarmac, but I hassled a flight attendant for pre-takeoff drinks. She was nice. “As soon as we’re in the air, honey,” she said. “Here’s a blanket. You look like you’re freezing!” The little bottle of Scotch I finally got went straight down my throat and I took Antonio’s as well, downed it and called for more. We hadn’t spoken a word since we boarded, and as soon as we took off, Antonio just fell asleep. Somehow, I didn’t care.
It was a high-tech airplane, and it had in-flight Internet access. I went straight to a site on Greek mythology I knew from my studies and began to read.
Demeter and Persephone
“In the oldest times, the earth flowered and bore fruit all the year around….
“There are two legends about Persephone, beloved daughter of the Demeter (who sees to the flourishing of all things) In the first, Persephone was playing with her friends in a Sicilian meadow. It happened that just then, Hades, god of the Underworld, had risen up to walk upon the face of the earth. Looking down on him, Aphrodite, for her own purposes, entreated her son Cupid to send an arrow of love to strike his heart and cause him to fall in love with Persephone. He immediately fell deeply in love with her, raped her there, and dragged her down into the Underworld to be his queen.
In the alternate story, Persephone, in the meadow, simply came upon a “cosmic flower,” and when she plucked it the earth opened and she was swallowed down into the Underworld with the same result.
“This abduction threw her mother Demeter into such a state of confusion and anger that she caused all the harvests to fail, animals died, and there was no rain to water the earth. Finally Zeus, seeing this, persuaded Hades to give Persephone up. Unhappily, Persephone had eaten some pomegranate seeds in the Underworld, and so Hades had a hold on her soul. A compromise was struck: for four months out of the year, Persephone had to return to be his queen, and as a result Demeter would cause the earth to grow cold until she returned in the spring.
But one of the eternal images of Greek mythology is the transcendent joy expressed by Demeter as she greets her beloved daughter, returning to her bosom from the Underworld.”
Was this just some drug-infused meaning I was imposing on the crazy events of our hallucinogenic honeymoon? But then, why had Antonio appeared just as I’d plucked the Bird of Paradise in Golden Gate Park? Why my constant sense of a descent into darkness? Why the old woman on the Acrocorinth speaking of “the voices of the old ones? She was real, wasn’t she? Or was that my imagination too? – we hadn’t been able to find her on the stairs. Why had all these intensely sexual events taken place? And goddamn it, why the fucking cave that led down into the earth? I thought back to that crazy, passionate day by the river. That boatman, what was his name? Cantino, Carlino? No, it was Caronte! I’d never heard a name like that. On an impulse I checked the translation from Italian into Greek on-line and when I clicked the mouse a shudder went through my body. In Greek, the name is Charon. Charon the Ferryman. Charon, who carries the souls of the newly deceased across the River Styx into the Underworld, the world of the dead. Never to return.
I would quit my job. I would move to New York. I had to leave him now. I could disappear. To somewhere he’d never find me. But when we reached Athens and checked into the airport hotel and closed the door to our room I fell into his arms and began kissing him like a mad thing. We fell onto the bed and it was the most intense and hopelessly intense sexual experience of them all. I knew in the heat of my orgasms that he owned me, that he’d owned me all along, that he always would, that I would follow him anywhere and do anything to drag him back to me if he tried to get away. But in the morning, I lay there in fear. Who had he become? Who
had I become?
As if he had heard my thoughts, he turned to me with a strange smile on his face, as if he knew my suspicions and at the same time didn’t know them at all.
“We must go back, Gabrielle,” he said, an innocent look on his beautiful face. “Maybe it will not be Greece, but yes, we must go back. l think it will be next spring. Yes, when winter is finished. And I never stop loving you.”
Finally, the long flight to San Francisco. I was dead-tired exhausted when the flight set down at SFO. We stumbled into the baggage lounge like zombies, then I remembered we had no baggage – I was returning in the same clothes I’d worn for the previous five days. The taxi dropped us at my apartment, and I dragged myself into my living room to the sound of my phone ringing.
It was my mother.
“Gabrielle?”
“Yeah, Mom, we’re home.”
“My God, Gabrielle, where have you been? I tried emailing you and calling your hotel in Paris but you’d simply disappeared. Are you OK? I was so worried. I thought you’d been kidnapped or something. Don’t you care about your mother’s feelings at all? Oh, I’m so glad you’re home! Please, don’t go running off with that Antonio again. I was so worried!”
Hearing her voice, I realized hanging with Hades had actually been a lot of fun. I realized I’d have to explain to her about the four-month annual vacations I had coming up.
And that her other name was Demeter.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - A European Escape
Chapter 2 - By The River of Passion
Chapter 3 - Greece: Slippery When Wet
Ancient Passions (Ancient Passions Series # 1) Page 7
