The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller
And now, Madame, since by the terms of this contract we have only a few thousand more years to run, I say bink-bink and bid you good-day. This is positively the end. Bink-bink!
Before the rice diet got properly under way it began to rain, not heavy rains, but moist, intermittent rains, a half hour’s sprinkle, a thunder shower, a drizzle, a warm spray, a cold spray, an electric needle bath. It went on for days. The aeroplanes couldn’t land because the flying field had become too soggy. The roads had become a slimy yellow mucus, the flies swarmed in dizzy, drunken constellations round one’s head and bit like fiends. Indoors it was cold, damp, fungus-bitten; I slept in my clothes with my overcoat piled on top of the blankets and the windows closed tight. When the sun came out it was hot, an African heat which caked and blistered the mud, which made your head ache and gave you a restlessness which increased as soon as the rain began to fall. I was eager to go to Phaestos but I kept putting it off for a change of weather. I saw Tsoutsou again; he told me that the prefect had been inquiring about me. “He wants to see you,” he said. I didn’t dare to ask what for, I said I would pay him a visit shortly.
Between drizzles and downpours I explored the town more thoroughly. The outskirts of the city fascinated me. In the sun it was too hot, in the rain it was creepily cold. On all sides the town edged off abruptly, like an etching drowned in a plate of black zinc. Now and then I passed a turkey tied to a doorknob by a string; the goat was ubiquitous and the donkey. There were wonderful cretins and dwarves too who wandered about with freedom and ease; they belonged to the scene, like the cactus, like the deserted park, like the dead horse in the moat, like the pet turkeys tied to the doorknobs.
Along the waterfront there was a fang-like row of houses behind a hastily made clearing, strangely reminiscent of certain old quarters in Paris where the municipality has begun to create light and air for the children of the poor. In Paris one roams from quarter to quarter through imperceptible transitions, as if moving through invisible beaded curtains. In Greece the changes are sharp, almost painful. In some places you can pass through all the changes of fifty centuries in the space of five minutes. Everything is delineated, sculptured, etched. Even the wastelands have an eternal cast about them. You see everything in its uniqueness—a man sitting on a road under a tree: a donkey climbing a path near a mountain: a ship in a harbor in a sea of turquoise: a table on a terrace beneath a cloud. And so on. Whatever you look at you see as if for the first time; it won’t run away, it won’t be demolished overnight; it won’t disintegrate or dissolve or revolutionize itself. Every individual thing that exists, whether made by God or man, whether fortuitous or planned, stands out like a nut in an aureole of light, of time and of space. The shrub is the equal of the donkey; a wall is as valid as a belfry; a melon is as good as a man. Nothing is continued or perpetuated beyond its natural time; there is no iron will wreaking its hideous path of power. After a half hour’s walk you are refreshed and exhausted by the variety of the anomalous and sporadic. By comparison Park Avenue seems insane and no doubt is insane. The oldest building in Herakleion will outlive the newest building in America. Organisms die; the cell lives on. Life is at the roots, embedded in simplicity, asserting itself uniquely.
I called regularly at the vice consul’s home for my bowl of rice. Sometimes he had visitors. One evening the head of the merchant tailors’ association dropped in. He had lived in America and spoke a quaint, old-fashioned English. “Gentleman, will you have a cigar?” he would say. I told him I had been a tailor myself once upon a time. “But he’s a journalist now,” the vice consul hastily put in. “He’s just read my book.” I began to talk about alpaca sleeve linings, bastings, soft rolled lapels, beautiful vicunas, flap pockets, silk vests and braided cutaways. I talked about these things madly for fear the vice consul would divert the conversation to his pet obsession. I wasn’t quite sure whether the boss tailor had come as a friend or as a favored menial. I didn’t care, I decided to make a friend of him if only to keep the conversation off that infernal book which I had pretended to have read but which I couldn’t stomach after page three.
“Where was your shop, gentleman?” asked the tailor.
“On Fifth Avenue,” I said. “It was my father’s shop.”
“Fifth Avenue—that’s a very rich street, isn’t it?” he said, whereupon the vice consul pricked up his ears.
“Yes,” I said, “we had only the best customers—nothing but bankers, brokers, lawyers, millionaires, steel and iron magnates, hotel keepers, and so on.”
“And you learned how to cut and sew?” he said.
“I could only cut pants,” I answered. “Coats were too complicated.”
“How much did you charge for a suit, gentleman?”
“Oh, at that time we asked only a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five dollars….”
He turned to the vice consul to ask him to calculate what that would be in drachmas. They figured it out. The vice consul was visibly impressed. It was a staggering sum in Greek money—enough to buy a small ship. I felt that they were somewhat skeptical. I began talking carload lots—about telephone books, skyscrapers, tickertape, paper napkins and all the ignominious paraphernalia of the big city which makes the yokel roll his eyes as if he’d seen the Red Sea opening up. The ticker tape arrested the tailor’s attention. He had been to Wall Street once, to visit the stock exchange. He wanted to speak about it. He asked me diffidently if there weren’t men in the street who ran their own little markets. He began making deaf and dumb signs as they used to do in the curb market. The vice consul looked at him as if he were slightly touched. I came to his rescue. Of course there were such men, thousands of them, all trained in this special deaf and dumb language, I asserted vigorously. I stood up and made a few signs myself, to demonstrate how it was done. The vice consul smiled. I said I would take them inside the stock exchange, on the floor itself. I described that madhouse in detail, ordering myself slices of Anaconda Copper, Amalgamated Tin, Tel & Tel, anything I could remember of that crazy Wall Street past whether volatile, combustible or analgesic. I ran from one corner of the room to the other, buying and selling like a maniac, standing at the vice consul’s commode and telephoning my broker to flood the market, calling my banker to make a loan of fifty thousand immediately, calling the telegraph jakes to take a string of telegrams, calling the grain and wheat trusters in Chicago to dump a load in the Mississippi, calling the Secretary of the Interior to inquire if he had passed that bill about the Indians, calling my chauffeur to tell him to put a new spare tire on the back behind the rumble seat, calling my shirt-maker to curse him for making the neck too tight on the pink and white shirt and what about my initials. I ran across the seat and gobbled a sandwich at the Exchange Buffet. I said hello to a friend of mine who was going upstairs to his office to blow his brains out. I bought the racing edition and stuck a carnation in my button hole. I had my shoes shined, while answering telegrams and telephoning with the left hand. I bought a few thousand railroad stocks absent-mindedly and switched to Consolidated Gas on a hunch that the new pork barrel bill would improve the housewives’ lot. I almost forgot to read the weather report; fortunately I had to run back to the cigar store to fill my breast pocket with a handful of Corona-Coronas and that reminded me to look up the weather report to see if it had rained in the Ozark region.
The tailor was listening to me goggle-eyed. “That’s the truth,” he said excitedly to the vice consul’s wife who had just made another bowl of soggy rice for me. And then suddenly it occurred to me that Lindbergh was coming back from Europe. I ran for the elevator and took the express to the 109th floor of a building that hadn’t been built yet. I ran to the window and opened it. The street was choked with frantically cheering men, women, boys, girls, horse cops, motorcycle cops, ordinary cops, thieves, bulls, plainclothesmen, Democrats, Republicans, farmers, lawyers, acrobats, thugs, bank clerks, stenographers, floor-walkers, anything with pants or skirts on, anything that could cheer, holler, whistle, sta
I took a mouthful of rice to quiet myself. “How high is the tallest building?” asked the vice consul.
I looked at the tailor. “You answer it,” I said.
He guessed about 57 stories.
I said—“A hundred and forty two, not counting the flagpole.” I stood up again to illustrate. Best way is to count the windows. The average skyscraper has roughly 92,546 windows back and front. I undid my belt and put it on again clumsily, as if I were a window-cleaner. I went to the window and sat on the sill outside. I cleaned the window thoroughly. I unhooked myself and went to the next window. I did that for four and a half hours, making roughly 953 windows cleaned, scraped and waterproofed.
“Doesn’t it make you dizzy?” asked the tailor.
“No, I’m used to it,” I said. “I was a steeplejack once—after I quit the merchant tailoring business.” I looked at the ceiling to see if I could do any demonstrating with the chandeliers.
“You’d better eat your rice,” said the vice consul’s wife.
I took another spoonful by way of politeness and absent-mindedly reached for the decanter in which there was the cognac. I was still excited about Lindbergh’s homecoming. I forgot that actually, on that day when he landed at the Battery, I was digging a ditch for the Park Department in the County of Catawpa. The Commissioner was making a speech at a bowling club, a speech I had written for him the day before.
The vice consul was completely at home now in the New World. He had forgotten about his contribution to life and letters. He was pouring me another drink.
Had the gentleman tailor ever gone to a ball game, I inquired. He hadn’t. Well, he surely must have heard of Christy Mathewson—or Walter Johnson? He hadn’t. Had he ever heard of a spitball? He hadn’t. Or a home run? He hadn’t. I threw the sofa cushions around on the parlor floor—first, second, third base and home plate. I dusted the plate with the napkin. I put on my cage. I caught a fast one right over the plate. Strike! Two more and he’s out, I explained. I threw off the mask and ran towards the infield. I looked up through the roof and I saw the ball dropping out of the planet Pluto. I caught it with one hand and threw it to the shortstop. He’s out, I said, it was a fly. Three more innings to go. How about a little popcorn? Have a bottle of pop, then? I took out a package of Spearmint and I stuck a rib in my throat. Always buy Wrigley’s, I said, it lasts longer. Besides, they spend $5,000,000,963.00 a year for advertising. Gives people work. Keeps the subways clean…. How about the Carnegie Library? Would you like to pay a visit to the library? Five million, six hundred and ninety eight thousand circulating subscribers. Every book thoroughly bound, filed, annotated, fumigated and wrapped in cellophane. Andrew Carnegie gave it to the City of New York in memory of the Homestead Riots. He was a poor boy who worked his way to the top. He never knew a day of joy. He was a very great millionaire who proved that it pays to work hard and save your pennies. He was wrong, but that doesn’t make any difference. He’s dead now and he left us a chain of libraries which makes the working people more intelligent, more cultured, more informed, in short, more miserable and unhappy than they ever were, bless his heart. Let’s go now to Grant’s Tomb….
The tailor looked at his watch. It was getting late, he thought. I poured myself a nightcap, picked up the first, second and third bases and looked at the parrot which was still awake because they had forgotten to put the hood over the cage.
“It’s been a wonderful evening,” I said, shaking hands all around, shaking hands with the maid too by mistake. “You must come and see me when I get back to New York I have a town house and a country house, you know. The weather is excellent in the Fall, when the smoke has cleared away. They’re building a new dynamo over near Spuyten Duyvil: it runs by ether waves. The rice was excellent tonight. And the cognac too….”
To-morrow I’ll go to Phaestos, I said to myself, picking my way through the fang-bitten streets like a laminated water-moccasin. I had to remind myself that I was in Crete, a quite different Crete than I had pictured to myself in my dreams. Again I had that feeling of the back pages of Dickens’ novels, of a quaint, one-legged world illumined by a jaded moon: a land that had survived every catastrophe and was now palpitating with a blood beat, a land of owls and herons and crazy relics such as sailors bring back from foreign shores. In the moonlight, navigating through the silent streets like a foundering ship, I felt that the earth was bearing me through a zone I had never been carried through before. I was a little nearer to the stars and the ether was charged with their nearness; it was not simply that they were more brilliant, or that the moon which had taken on the color of a yam had grown swollen and lopsided, but that the atmosphere had undergone a subtle, perfumed alteration. There was a residue, an elixir, I might almost say, which had clung to the aura which the earth gives off and which had increased in essence from repeated journeys through this particular corner of the zodiac. It was nostalgic; it awakened those ageless hordes of ancestral men who stand with eyes closed, like trees after the passing of a flood, in the ever-moving stream of the blood. The blood itself went through a change, thickening with the remembrance of man-made dynasties, of animals raised to divination, of instruments poised to thousand year niceties, of floods lapped up, divested of secrets, unburdened of treasures. The earth became again that strange one-legged creature which pegs and wobbles through diamond-pointed fields, passing faithfully through all the habitations of its solar creation; became that which it will be to the end and which in becoming transmogrifies the obscene goat into the stillness of that which always was, since there is no other, not even the possibility of a simulacrum.
Greece is what everybody knows, even in absentia, even as a child or as an idiot or as a not-yet-born. It is what you expect the earth to look like given a fair chance. It is the subliminal threshold of innocence. It stands, as it stood from birth, naked and fully revealed. It is not mysterious or impenetrable, not awesome, not defiant, not pretentious. It is made of earth, air, fire and water. It changes seasonally with harmonious undulating rhythms. It breathes, it beckons, it answers.
Crete is something else. Crete is a cradle, an instrument, a vibrating test tube in which a volcanic experiment has been performed. Crete can hush the mind, still the bubble of thought. I wanted so long and so ardently to see Crete, to touch the soil of Knossus, to look at a faded fresco, to walk where “they” had walked. I had let my mind dwell on Knossus without taking in the rest of the land. Beyond Knossus my mind pictured nothing but a great Australian waste. That Homer had sung of the hundred cities of Crete I didn’t know because I could never bring myself to read Homer; that relics of the Minoan period had been found in the tomb of Akhenaton I was ignorant of also. I knew, or believed rather, only that here at Knossus on an island which nowadays scarcely anybody ever thinks to visit there had been initiated some twenty-five or thirty centuries before the dawn of that blight called Christianity a way of life which makes everything that has happened since in this Western World seem pallid, sickly, ghost-ridden and doomed. The Western world, we say, never once thinking to include those other great social experiments which were made in South America and Central America, passing them over always in our rapid historical surveys as if they were accidents, jumping from the Middle Ages to the discovery of America, as if this bastard bloom on the
The island then was once studded with citadels, the gleaming hub of a wheel whose splendor cast its shadow over the whole known world. In China there was another great revolution going on, in India another, in Egypt another, in Persia another; there were reflections from one to another which intensified the piercing gleams; there were echoes and reverberations. The vertical life of man was constantly churned by the revolutions of these great gleaming wheels of light. Now it is dark. Nowhere throughout the greatly enlarged world is there the least sign or evidence of the turning of a wheel. The last wheel has fallen apart, the vertical life is done with; man is spreading over the face of the earth in every direction like a fungus growth, blotting out the last gleams of light, the last hopes.