Report to Grego by Nikos Kazantzakis
4
THE SON
WHATEVER fell into my childhood mind was imprinted there with such depth and received by me with such avidity that even now in my old age I never grow tired of recalling and reliving it. With unerring accuracy I remember my very first acquaintance with the sea, with fire, with woman, and with the odors of the world.
The earliest memory of my life is this: Still unable to stand, I crept on all fours to the threshold and fearfully, longingly, extended my tender head into the open air of the courtyard. Until then I had looked through the windowpane but had seen nothing. Now I not only looked, I actually saw the world for the very first time. And what an astonishing sight that was! Our little courtyard-garden seemed without limits. There was buzzing from thousands of invisible bees, an intoxicating aroma, a warm sun as thick as honey. The air flashed as though armed with swords, and, between the swords, erect, angel-like insects with colorful, motionless wings. advanced straight for me. I screamed from fright, my eyes filled with tears, and the world vanished.
On another day, I remember, a man with a thorny beard took me in his arms and brought me down to the harbor. As we approached, I heard a wild beast sighing and roaring as if wounded or uttering threats. Frightened, I jumped erect in the man’s arms and shrieked like a bird; I wanted to go away. Suddenly—the bitter odor of carob beans, tar, and rotten citrons. My creaking vitals opened to receive it. I kept jumping and pitching about in the hairy arms that held me, until at a turn in the street—dark indigo, seething, all cries and smells (what a beast that was! what freshness! what a boundless sigh!)—the entire sea poured into me frothingly. My tender temples collapsed, and my head filled with laughter, salt, and fear.
Next I remember a woman, Anníka, a neighbor of ours, newly married, recently a mother, plump and fair, with long blond hair and huge eyes. That evening I was playing in the yard; I must have been about three years old. The little garden smelled of summer. The woman leaned over, placed me in her lap, hugged me. I, closing my eyes, fell against her exposed bosom and smelled her body: the warm, dense perfume, the acid scent of milk and sweat. The newly married body was steaming. I inhaled the vapor in an erotic torpor, hanging from her high bosom. Suddenly I felt overcome by dizziness and fainted. Blushing terribly, the frightened neighbor put me down, depositing me between two pots of basil. After that she never placed me on her lap again. She just looked at me very tenderly with her large eyes and smiled.
One summer night I was sitting in our yard again, on my little stool. I remember lifting my eyes and seeing the stars for the first time. Jumping to my feet, I cried out in fear, “Sparks! Sparks!” The sky seemed a vast conflagration to me; my little body was on fire.
Such were my first contacts with earth, sea, woman, and the star-filled sky. Even now, in the most profound moments of my life, I experience these four terrifying elements with exactly the same ardor as in my infancy. Only then, when I succeed in re-experiencing them with the same astonishment, fright, and joy they gave me when I was an infant, do I feel—even today—that I am experiencing these four terrifying elements deeply, as deeply as my body and soul can plunge. Since these were the first forces which I consciously felt occupying my soul, the four joined indissolubly inside me and became one. They are like a single face which keeps changing masks. Looking at the star-filled sky, I sometimes imagine that it is a flowering garden, sometimes a dark, dangerous sea, sometimes a taciturn face flooded with tears.
Every one of my emotions, moreover, and every one of my ideas, even the most abstract, is made up of these four primary ingredients. Within me, even the most metaphysical problem takes on a warm physical body which smells of sea, soil, and human sweat. The Word, in order to touch me, must become warm flesh. Only then do I understand—when I can smell, see, and touch.
In addition to these first four contacts, my soul was also deeply influenced by a fortuitous event. Fortuitous? Such are the prudent, unmanly nebulosities with which the cowardly mind, which quakes lest it utter some nonsense and wound its dignity, characterizes whatever it is incapable of interpreting. I must have been four years old. On New Year’s Day my father gave me a canary and a revolving globe as a handsel, “a good hand,” as we say in Crete. Closing the doors and windows of my room, I used to open the cage and let the canary go free. It had developed the habit of sitting at the very top of the globe and singing for hours and hours, while I held my breath and listened.
This extremely simple event, I believe, influenced my life more than all the books and all the people I came to know afterwards. Wandering insatiably over the earth for years, greeting and taking leave of everything, I felt that my head was the globe and that a canary sat perched on the top of my mind, singing.
I recount my childhood years in detail, not because the earliest memories have such a great fascination, but because during this period, as in dreams, a seemingly insignificant event exposes the true, unmascaraed face of the soul more than any psychoanalysis can do later. Since the means of expression in childhood or dreams are very simple, even the most intricate of inner wealth is delivered from all superfluity, so that only the essence remains.
The child’s brain is soft, his flesh tender. Sun, moon, rain, wind, and silence all descend upon him. He is frothy batter and they knead him. The child gulps the world down greedily, receives it in his entrails, assimilates it, and turns it into child.
I remember frequently sitting on the doorstep of our home when the sun was blazing, the air on fire, grapes being trodden in a large house in the neighborhood, the world fragrant with must. Shutting my eyes contentedly, I used to hold out my palms and wait. God always came—as long as I remained a child, He never deceived me—He always came, a child just like myself, and deposited His toys in my hands: sun, moon, wind. “They’re gifts,” He said, “they’re gifts. Play with them. I have lots more.” I would open my eyes. God would vanish, but His toys would remain in my hands.
Though I did not know this (did not know it because I was experiencing it), I possessed the Lord’s omnipotence: I created the world as I wanted it. I was soft dough; so was the world. I remember loving cherries more than any other fruit when I was little. I used to fill a bucket at the well, toss them in—red or black, crunchily firm—lean over, and admiré how they swelled the moment they entered the water. But when I removed them, I saw to my great disappointment that they shrank. I closed my eyes, therefore, to avoid seeing them shrink, and thrust them—still monstrous, as I imagined—into my mouth.
This insignificant detail exposes in its entirety the method by which I confront reality, even now in my old age. I re-create it—brighter, better, more suitable to my purpose. The mind cries out, explains, demonstrates, protests; but inside me a voice rises and shouts at it, “Be quiet, mind; let us hear the heart.” What heart? Madness, the essence of life. And the heart begins to warble.
“Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality,” says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life.
Truly, what miracles are the child’s mind, eyes, and ears! How insatiably they gobble down this world and fill themselves. The world is a bird with red, green, and yellow feathers. How the child hunts this bird and tries to catch it.
Truly, nothing more resembles God’s eyes than the eyes of a child; they see the world for the first time, and create it. Before this, the world is chaos. All creatures—animals, trees, men, stones; everything: forms, colors, voices, smells, lightning flashes—flow unexplained in front of the child’s eyes (no, not in front of them, inside them), and he cannot fasten them down, cannot establish order. The child’s world is made not of clay, to last, but of clouds. A cool breeze blows across his temples and the world condenses, attenuates, vanishes. Chaos must have passed in front of God’s eyes in just this way before the Creation.
When I was a child, I became one with sky, insects, sea, wind—whatever I saw or touched. The wind had a
The world and I still had not parted. Little by little, however, I drew myself out of its embrace. It stood on one side, I on the other, and the battle began.
As the child sits on his doorstep receiving the world’s dense, turbid deluge, one day he suddenly sees. The five senses have grown firm. Each has carved out its own road and taken its share of the world’s kingdom. The sense of smell was the very first to grow firm within me, I remember. It was the first to start establishing order over chaos.
Every person had his distinctive odor for me when I was two or three years old. Before raising my eyes to see him, I recognized him by the smell he emitted. My mother smelled one way, my father another; each uncle had his special odor, as did each woman of the neighborhood. When someone took me in his or her arms, it was always because of his smell that I either loved him or began to kick and reject him. In time this power evaporated. The various smells blended; everyone plunged into the same stink of sweat, tobacco, and benzene.
Above all, I distinguished unerringly between the smells of Christian and Turk. A kindly Turkish family lived across the street from us. When the wife paid a visit to our house, the odor she emitted made me nauseous, and I used to break off a twig of basil and smell it, or else stuff an acacia flower into each of my nostrils. But this Turkish lady, Fatome, had a little girl about four years old (I must have been three) who exuded a strange smell neither Turkish nor Greek, which I found very pleasing. Eminé was white and chubby, with palms and soles dyed with cinchona, and hair done up in tiny, tiny braids with a shell or little blue stone hanging from each to ward off the evil eye. She smelled of nutmeg.
I knew the hours when her mother was away from home. I used to go to our street door at those times and watch Eminé sitting on her threshold chewing gum. I signaled her that I was coming over. But her door had three steps which seemed immensely high to me. How could I ever scale them? I sweated, I slaved, and after a struggle mounted the first. Next, a new struggle to climb the second. Stopping for a moment to catch my breath, I raised my eyes to look at her. She sat on the threshold completely indifferent. Instead of offering her hand to help, she just looked at me and waited without budging. She seemed to be saying, If you can conquer the obstacles, everything will be fine. You’ll reach me and we’ll play together. If you cannot, turn back! But I conquered them at last after much struggle and reached the threshold where she was sitting. She rose then, took me by the hand, and brought me inside. Her mother was away the entire morning; she hired out as a charwoman. Without losing a moment, we took off our socks, lay down on our backs, and glued our bare soles together. We did not breathe a word. Closing my eyes, I felt Eminé’s warmth pass from her soles to mine, then ascend little by little to my knees, belly, breast, and fill me entirely. The delight I experienced was so profound that I thought I would faint. Never in my whole life has a woman given me a more dreadful joy; never have I felt the mystery of the female body’s warmth so profoundly. Even now, seventy years later, I close my eyes and feel Eminé’s warmth rise from my soles and branch out through my entire body, my entire soul.
Little by little I lost my fear of walking and climbing. Going inside the nearby houses, I played with the children of the neighborhood. The world was growing broader.
When I was five years old, I was taken to some woman vaguely a teacher to learn how to draw i’s and koulouria on the slate. This was supposed to train my hand so that I would be able to write the letters of the alphabet when I grew older. She was a simple peasant type, short and fattish, a little humpbacked, with a wart on the right side of her chin. Her name was Madam Areté. She guided my hand (her breath smelled of coffee) and expounded on how I should hold the chalk and govern my fingers.
At first I wanted nothing to do with her. I liked neither her breath nor her hump. But then, though I don’t know how, she began to be transformed little by little before my eyes: the wart disappeared, her back straightened, her flabby body grew slim and beautiful, and finally, after a few weeks, she became a slender angel wearing a snow-white tunic and holding an immense bronze trumpet. I must have seen this angel on some icon in the church of Saint Minas. Once again the eyes of childhood had performed their miracle: angel and Madam Teacher had become one.
Years went by. I traveled abroad, then returned again to Crete. I called at my teacher’s house. A little old lady was sitting on the doorstep sunning herself. I recognized her by the wart on her chin. When I approached and made myself known to her, she began to weep with joy. I had brought her some presents: coffee, sugar, and a box of loukoums. I hesitated a moment, ashamed to ask her, but the image of the angel with the trumpet had become so firmly established inside me that I could not restrain myself.
“Madam Areté, did you ever wear a white tunic and hold a large bronze trumpet in your hands?”
“Saints preserve us!” the poor old lady cried out, crossing herself. “Me a white jelab, me a trumpet? God forbid! Me a chanteuse!”
And her eyes began to flow.
All things were magically re-kneaded in my yeasty childhood mind; they were brought beyond the reasonable and very close to madness. But this madness is the grain of salt which keeps good sense from rotting. I lived, spoke, and moved in a fairy tale which I myself created at every moment, carving out paths in it to allow me to pass. I never saw the same thing twice, because I gave it a new face each time and made it unrecognizable. Thus the world’s virginity renewed itself at every moment.
Certain fruits, especially, had an inexplicable fascination for me, cherries and figs above all. Not simply the fig itself, the fruit, but the fig leaves and their aroma. I used to close my eyes and smell them, turning pale from dreadful bodily contentment. No, not contentment—agitation, fear, tremor, as though I were entering a dark, dangerous forest.
One day my mother took me with her and we traveled to a secluded beach outside of Megalo Kastro, a place where women went swimming. My brain filled with a vast boiling sea. Protruding from this fiery indigo were bodies, very pale, weak, and strange, so it seemed to me, as though they were ill. They were emitting shrill cries and hurling armfuls of water at one another. I could see most of them only as far as the waist; from the waist down they were in the sea. Below the waist they must be fish, I decided; they must be the mermaids that people talk about. I remembered the fairy tale my grandmother told me about the mermaid who is Alexander the Great’s sister. Roaming the seas in search of her brother, she asks all the boats that pass, “Is King Alexander alive?” The skipper leans over the gunwale and shouts, “He’s alive, my lady, alive and flourishing!” Alas if he says the king is dead, for then she beats the sea with her tail, raises a tempest, and’ shatters all the boats.
One of these mermaids swimming in front of me rose out of the waves and beckoned. She shouted something at me, but the sea’s din was so great that I could not understand her. I had already entered the world of the fairy tale, however, and thinking she was inquiring about her brother, I cried out fearfully, “He’s alive, alive and flourishing!” Suddenly all the mermaids shook with laughter. Ashamed, I ran away in a furor. “They were women, damn them, not mermaids,” I murmured, and I sat down on a small stone, completely humiliated, with my back turned to the sea.
I thank God that this refreshing childhood vision still lives inside me in all its fullness of color and sound. This is what keeps my mind untouched by wastage, keeps it from withering and running dry. It is the sacred drop of immortal water which prevents me from dying. When I wish to speak of the sea, woman, or God in my writing, I gaze down into my breast and listen carefully to what the child within me says. He dictates to me; and if it sometimes happens that I come close to
Both of my parents circulate in my blood, the one fierce, hard, and morose, the other tender, kind, and saintly. I have carried them all my days; neither has died. As long as I live, they too will live inside me and battle in their antithetical ways to govern my thoughts and actions. My lifelong effort is to reconcile them so that the one may give me his strength, the other her tenderness; to make the discord between them, which breaks out incessantly within me, turn to harmony inside their son’s heart.
Here is another incredible fact: The presence of my two parents is clearly manifested in my hands. My right hand is very strong, completely lacking in sensitivity, absolutely masculine. My left is excessively, pathologically sensitive. Whenever I recall the breast of a woman I loved, I feel pain and a slight tingling in my left palm. It is almost ready to turn black and blue from the pain, almost ready to manifest an actual wound. When I am alone and watching a bird soar in the air, I feel the warmth of its belly in my left palm. It was in my hands, and only in my hands, that my parents deserted each other and took separate possession, my father in my right hand and my mother in my left.
Here I must add an event which had a profound influence on my life. It was the first spiritual wound I received. Though I am old now, this wound still has not healed.
I must have been four years old. One of my uncles took me by the hand; apparently we were going to see a neighbor in the little graveyard of Saint Matthew’s, which lay inside the city walls.