Thoreau Bound, page 39
Penelope kissed my lips; I let her kiss me but I didn’t kiss her back.
“Dammit, Thoreau, either you’re a eunuch or you’re made of wood! In all those years you Americans go to school, don’t they teach you how to kiss right? ... Greece has a place for monks, it is called Mount Athos. What are you fighting this for? It will make our lives so much simpler. Like all men, you talk and talk about taking the road that nobody travels on, then you turn your back and walk the other way.”
“Penelope,” I said. “Please don’t take offense. For a woman like you I’d scale mermaids and Mount Olympus, and vice versa. But we can’t sleep together. My deeply ingrained morality will not let me make love with the girlfriend of my best friend.”
Penelope jumped off my lap then watched my eyes light up as her curvy body shimmied and her dress cascaded down. Lust might have ensnared me, but I was rescued by a lucky accident. At that moment Kosmos’s mule, Dante, ambled into the room. Unembarrassed by his swollen love-organ, he approached Penelope, nuzzled his nose against her posterior, then whinnied with yearning and joy.
Humor might break the tension and ease her disappointment.
“Penelope, if Dante lived in Bedlamerica right now his life would be easy. He would simply put a personal ad in one of those nervy meet-your-match websites: ‘WHM (well-hung mule) seeks frisky female for fun, friendship, dating, serious relationship, and play. Religion not important. Photo appreciated; asses need not apply.’”
Penelope burst into tears.
“Men!” she shouted. “In this whole damn town there are two virile males, and the only one who wants me is a mule!”
We devoured Penelope’s scrumptious dinner, and then we talked and laughed for hours and hours more. After receiving a playful pinch goodnight, I sat down in the big chair where Kosmos would sit when on Saturday mornings he read to Penelope. Staring through an always-open window I watched the sky and wondered what the stars were thinking ...
Penelope! There was something remarkable about her that she’d been hiding from me: maybe our friendship would someday yield a clue ... Katerina, Romantza, Meli — they had not yet come for refuge to Penelope’s house — I hoped that my gypsy friends were safe now, and that these wild women would find a way to make a living without becoming pretty prostitutes or petty thieves. ... The German women, Karin and Gertrude, had taught me a priceless lesson: the woman you’re sleeping with may not be the woman you love. ... Irene, her childlike enthusiasm, and the rosy innocence of her first romantic crush ... Bliss, the unattainable woman on the bicycle, had a body and a face that knocked me down — and I followed her from fiery curiosity: inside this pure beauty, what were her passions and her dreams? ... Victoria, the shy librarian, who found courage to do what many strong men never dare: to risk everything and confess her love ... At last my thoughts played around with Beatrice Loverly: she had beauty, brains, sincerity, and all the kindness in the world. Without ignoring her own needs, she devoted her life to helping others. She loved, not in the daydream or the feelings only, but in action, by helping and by caring ...
The noise of footsteps snapped this string of reveries.
“Penelope,” I said. “Are you taking a walk somewhere?”
Penelope placed her hand on my shoulder.
“To the place where all the old wealth is hiding,” she said. “Three nights a week I do the work of cleaning — the bank, the restaurants, the cafés — from midnight to six a.m.”
“I’ll help you,” I said. “Then you’ll be done in half the time.”
In the darkness she stroked my cheek.
“Thoreau: Did you come all the way to Greece to mop floors and scrub toilets? ... No, you came to clean your heart. Your own work is more important. Tomorrow I’ll show you a happy place in the mountains that the tourists haven’t discovered yet. Goodnight, dear.”
“Penelope?”
“Ti? What?”
“What’s that perfume you’re wearing?”
She laughed as she took my head between her hands, then pressed it against the section of her dress that lay above her heart.
“That is ammonia, my dear friend. The perfume of the working class.”
She kissed my forehead. With her mop in one hand and bucket in the other, she left the house cheerfully, humming an old Greek melody.
The next evening, when I had gone out to find food to cook for dinner, I saw posters plastered all around the town. There were the do-not-eat-the-cats posters, which I left alone; and there were the reward-money-for-gypsies posters, which I ripped down as quickly as I could find.
Penelope had been right as usual: the Greek men here, seeing me as a threat to their daughters and sisters and wives, were not friendly and would not let me be their friend. The two exceptions were Rakis — who asked if I needed anything — and another friend of Kosmos, Georgios, who opened his brother’s store so I could shop for groceries.
I returned home, my arms stuffed with bags of food. The kitchen had changed: it now contained a wooden table, crowded with burning candles and photographs of Kosmos. Penelope, kneeling in front of the table, sobbed as she wished aloud that Kosmos would be set free.
I touched her arm.
“Penelope,” I said. “It’s Friday and I know you miss your night with Kosmos. Let me read something to you, and maybe that will help.”
She cheered up at this idea, and brought me a heavy anthology bookmarked to the selection that she wanted to hear. It was a love-drama by the Roman playwright Pacuvius. Penelope lay down on the bed, I sat in a chair beside her, and then with fiery enthusiasm I began to read.
“The storm swells and the sea begins to shudder,
Darkness is doubled; and the tempest thickens
in the black of night; fire gleams vivid
Amid the clouds; the heavens with thunder shake;
Hail mixed with copious rain sudden descends
Precipitate; from all sides every blast
Breaks forth; fierce whirlwinds gather, and the flood
Boils with fresh ferocity.”
We saw lightning flash and immediately heard thunder booming, and then a storm — even more fierce than the version described in the drama — suddenly attacked the town. The clouds gathered, the winds bellowed, the gulls cried out, the waves leaped up as if they would jump off the earth and snatch the distant moon. The sea raged lusty and impulsive as an Italian opera rife with lovesick gypsies. Penelope frantically screamed.
“Penelope, what’s — ”
“Thoreau! Help me! I’m afraid of nothing except thunderstorms! When I was a little girl — ”
A blast of lightning-thunder rattled the house and Penelope screamed again.
“Hold me, Thoreau! It’s the only way to calm me down. Get into bed with me or else I’ll die of fright!”
I entered the bed then wrapped my arms around the woman; she snuggled up against me with a sly smile.
“Penelope,” I said. “Are you really terrified of storms?”
She threw off the sash around her dress then kissed my lips.
“Thoreau,” she whispered, “When I kiss you I hear bells.”
I tried to stand up but she held me firm.
“Those bells are ringing from the church, Penelope.”
A voice outside began to shout “The sheeps! The sheeps!”
Thunder and lightning cracked and blasted and Penelope kissed me again.
“Oh, goddesses!” she shouted. “I forgot! I forgot!”
I raised my head.
“Your pills or my condom?”
“The sheeps!” cried Penelope. “The fishing boats — the waves will smash them against the dock. They’ll be destroyed!”
She jumped out of bed then grabbed two large flashlights from a drawer.
“Grigora! Quickly! Get your shoes on, Thoreau, and come with me!”
We arrived at the dock amidst darkness and chaos and anxious shouts. The wind was so strong at times I needed to hold on to something to keep from being blown to the ground. In the nearest café, the town’s old mayor had organized a count and an accounting of the residents, to discover how many men were in danger, trapped in their fishing boats on the unrelenting sea. On the dock itself, Rakis stood, a true hero as he waved his arms to direct a dozen men. With the rain and the waves and the wind blowing wildly, Rakis pushed his weeping wife aside, and then he and the twelve men jumped into small wooden boats that rowed into the tempest to try to find their lost neighbors and friends. Wives and mothers of the missing were wailing and sobbing on the shoulders of those women whose husbands and sons were safe. There were no ambulances, no national guardsmen, no police, no rescue squads — only one lone doctor, an old man who shuffled into the café with his black bag, then sat down with a glass of retsina and his worry beads.
Ten men on the dock were tying ropes to the boats, trying to pull them up onto the dock before the waves could smash them to bits. These were not just boats for play: these were the fishing boats that made their livelihoods. Damaged boats might be repaired — losing weeks or months of precious work — but the boats that were destroyed could never be replaced.
“Thoreau,” said Penelope, “this town is full of old geezers. They are strong from their work, but they are not young men, katalavehees? ... ” She led me from the café to outside in the storm, where she gripped the shoulder of Kosmos’s friend.
“Georgios,” said Penelope. “You remember Thoreau, eh? He is strong like Rakis. Show him what to do.”
Georgios tied a thick rope to a boat, then placed my hands around the rope.
“Wait until I signal,” he said. “Then pull like a bull.”
When he lowered his hand I pulled, with all my strength, and the boat jerked up from the water onto the concrete dock. Georgios shouted “Bravo!” and then “Come!”. In this way we worked for three hours, alongside other old fishermen, to save whatever could be saved of the town’s fleet of ninety boats.
Rakis and his men returned safely. They had found one man — halfdrowned but still alive. Only one man had been reckless enough to fish that night. Everyone else had heeded the weather report — inside their throbbing arthritic joints — that told them for certain that a furious storm was near. Rakis carried the water-soaked man into the café. Minutes later there were shouts and cheers, and women screamed for joy, as the half-drowned man sat up, and the doctor raised his arm to say that all would soon be well.
The storm abated. Penelope placed her arm around me and we walked home. When we arrived there we found baskets of fruits and olives: the villagers had thanked me for my help. Penelope removed my clothes, rubbed my body dry with towels, served me a hot soup, tended the cuts and blisters on my hands, then rubbed my body with a soothing oil. She placed me on the bed, she stepped out of her dress, she wrapped her warm body around mine.
“Thoreau,” she said. “I think I understand now what you were saying about being friends from the neck up. But I’m a woman, too, don’t forget that.”
“Only a dead man could forget that, Penelope. And one kiss from you might wake him from the under-kingdom of the dead.”
She kissed me and she laughed.
“Let’s make a bargain that makes us both satisfied,” she said. “You will sleep with me in my bed. I will cook meals for you and clean your clothes. We can be friends only and have no sex together. But when I’m in the mood, I’ll try to get you in the mood, too. And three times a week I get to pinch your ass.”
“I’ll sleep in the guest room,” I said, “and share equally the cooking and cleaning. You can pinch me once a week.”
“Twice a week,” said Penelope. “And let’s seal the bargain with a kiss.”
“O.K., two pinches a week,” I said. “Sealed with a hug and a handshake.”
She kissed me for a passionate Meteoric minute. And then, thoroughly exhausted, inside each others arm we fell asleep.
On many evenings, after we’d eaten dinner together, Penelope and I would walk, holding hands, along the beach that stretched from Agia Souvlakis to Dembacchae. Midway, about one mile from each town, we reached Kosmos’s favorite cove that he called kaliparalea — the place where Penelope and I first met. Here, every evening, we would stop for a few minutes, laugh about that wild encounter, admire the curving sand dunes that surrounded us, and then smile at the beauty of the Greek-light sky and the roaring sea. Continuing our walk, we passed the heartbreaking hotel: where Kosmos had been devoured by Ligeia, and where I had refused an invitation to spend a night with Beatrice. For that foolish decision, I told Penelope, I would never forgive myself.
Walking further, we arrived at the town of Dembacchae. As we weaved through the back streets we felt an excitement and a sadness brewing, and at last we rejoiced as we entered the still-uninhabited garden once owned by Kosmos. I watered the plants while Penelope filled a basket with fresh herbs. All the while we remembered the joy of our great friend. We left rejuvenated, enjoying the walk homeward along the quiet beach.
This ritual of visiting that garden continued for six straight nights, but on the seventh we did not complete our trip. As I turned the corner to enter the cove, I spied a pitiful, hilarious, quixotic sight.
A small tent had been pitched on the sand. Adjacent to the tent we saw a notebook; and near it, sat a water bottle made of stainless steel. Beside the water, book and tent lay a naked man. With his back against the sand he looked as helpless as a turtle stuck in a shell turned upside-down. One hand, two lips, both eyelids and a private part were the only body pieces that he could move.
Feebly, he waved a flag he had made from a tree branch and a red-yellow-blue pair of superhero underwear. He was calling out for help, but in a voice so faint that he could not be heard unless you stood beside him. I approached the body, and Penelope followed, standing close behind me. The body was weak but the young man’s lips babbled energetically.
“Water, and Wasser, nero!
Hello there and yasu, halo.
He’s dying of sunstroke,
And thinking in one stroke
Of Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau.”
“Do you need help?” Penelope stupidly asked.
The young man gazed at Penelope’s figure and my face.
“Have I died and to Olympian heaven gone?
Or am I plunged to Hades where my thirst burns on?
This must be paradise! The sunset’s sacred show
And a great god and goddess come to make it so.”
“He’s a poet, Thoreau!” shouted Penelope, grasping the young man’s hand. “Treat him gently. Even when they’re healthy, poets are sensitive souls. Kosmos says that poets are the un-knowledged legislators of the world.”
Pensively, Penelope examined the poet’s private part.
“Kosmos also told me,” she said, “that poets are oversexed because they have the biggest pensées.”
The poet eyed the curious Penelope, then answered:
“Pensée fait la grandeur de l’homme — (blush pink!) —
The greatness of man lies in his power to think.”
I lifted the young man’s head, placed the water bottle to his lips, and watched as the poet drank greedily, sucking at the bottle like a baby sucking at the breast. After drinking half the bottle’s fluid the poet rhymed again.
“A poet sound asleep he fell,
Under the hot Greek sun.
And when he woke with thirst from hell,
He could not move or run.
A lovely lass and a warty old hag,
Passed by and thought him dead.
But when they saw his rising flag —
They screamed, they turned, they fled.”
Penelope folded the poet’s tent, stuffed it into the backpack that lay inside, then picked up the poet’s book. I grasped the man and raised his body off the sand, then carried him in my arms toward the house of Penelope.
“My name is Penelope,” she said. “And the brawny brainy hero who is holding you is named Odysseus Thoreau. Tell us how you wound up like this.”
The keen-minded man gazed at his benefactress.
“All my money,” he said “is now being managed by a pack of lovely gypsies.”
“Gypsies!” shouted Penelope. And her eyes gazed at the far away.
“What is it, Penelope?” I asked.
“Fifteen years ago my father had an accident which broke his leg. He crawled to an old cabin with an old wood stove. While he slept the cabin caught on fire. My father’s body would have burned to bones and ashes if it wasn’t for a gypsy girl! She pulled him out of the burning cabin and saved his life. From breathing smoke she almost died, and her perfect face wound up covered with ugly burns. One week after we took her to the doctor, she ran away. She must have been fifteen or sixteen — what great courage she had! I saw her only once before the accident, and I never saw her again. ... Tell us the rest of your troubles, Poet, so we think less of our own.”
The Poet drank more water and more, and then talked on.
“In the morning, just when I got off from the bus at Agia Souvlakis, ten women approached me and then begged me to give them food. They said they were starving, so I told them to take what they needed from my wallet and leave me the rest. They left me to rest. I was wondering how to help them when a police wagon, siren screaming, drove at eighty-miles-per-hour into town. The gypsy women scattered like birds when the cat walks by. They headed for Paleohora on Crete’s west coast, but when the police questioned me, I told them that the women were going in the opposite direction, eastward toward Dembacchae.”
