CHAPTER 4: Ithaca.

I walk off of the ferry still thinking about Pentheus, the man of suffering, his head being carried on a pole by his murder-frenzied mother, and having visions of  the gold-laden box containing the head of St. Andrew who insisted on dying on the cross. I’m look for the lights of a hotel, when a woman appears out of the darkness at dockside, steps into the dim light emanating from the hold as I step off the gangway. “Dwmatia;” she asks, “dwmatia;” (thomatia, room). She grabs my arm, pulls me away from the crowd.

After a confusing conversation containing bits of both Greek and English wherein I try to establish what she’s going to charge for a room, I follow her up a dark mountain, up several flights of cement stairs, between buildings, beside homes, through alleys. When I falter under the weight of my backpack, she takes my hand in her warm soft hand. “Room very nice,” she says, “home very nice.” She’s right. I am wondering if it’ll be worth the climb. In front of a church, the path turns left along the mountainside, through a dark alley, and a man steps out of the darkness toward us. She’s brought me up here to an ambush, I think. But the man greets her and walks on past. Finally, at what must be the top of the mountain, we come to her home.

Once inside the room, she throws open the window and pushes out the shutters, so I can admire the lights in the bay far below. She turns on a light, and I finally see who I’ve allowed to wrestle me up here. She’s a little old woman with a big smile, must be sixty, in a plain dress and faded sweater. The entire room is new and painted off-white. Two beds, one double, the other single butt up against the right wall. She gives me my choice, and I take the single. A large circular table with two plastic chairs stands in the corner beneath the window. An electrical cord extends from the ceiling with a bare electric light bulb hanging from it. The silence outdoors is broken by a motorbike below at dockside.

“Ella,” she says, “Ella,” and takes me by the hand to their dimly-lit patio under a grape-vined trellis, sets me down and gives me a drink of water which she dips from their well with a rope and pail. In the traditional Greek fashion, she gives me a smidgen of grape preserves she made from her own grapes off the vined trellis above us and proudly holds up a jar of olive oil which she squeezed from trees at the edge of the patio. Between the evening air and drink of cold water, I finally quit sweating. She introduces her daughter, a husky, big-armed girl in a white puffy blouse and a red Spanish-looking skirt. The three of us sit on the patio and talk though my smidgen of Greek and their smidgen of English. When our understanding runs short, we pantomime. Something else I’m not very good at.

---

Since Odysseus is the most famous traveler of all time, I’m not surprised he has a close relationship to Hermes. Hermes was born of Zeus and Maia, a shy nymph who lived in a cave in the northern Peloponnese just eighty kilometers east of Patras. As a divine child, Hermes was both precocious and resourceful, slipping out to steal his brother Apollo’s cattle the night after he was born. An old man named Battus saw him with the cattle but agreed to say nothing in return for one of them. Hermes didn’t trust Battus and returned with voice and features changed to test the old man’s word. When Battus readily told on him, Hermes mercilessly turned him to stone, the thought and the murder occurring simultaneously. Hermes is nimble of mind but not a deep thinker, not prone to contemplation. For him, thoughts are deeds. When Apollo learned of Hermes theft, he confronted the divine child, but Hermes lied. Apollo then took him to their father, Zeus, but Hermes lied to him also. These actions early in life illustrate Hermes basic nature as a murderer, thief and liar.

As an adult, Hermes had a mortal son by a girl of fourteen, Chione the snowmaiden. Both Hermes and Apollo were enamored with her, but Apollo planned to wait until night to take her. Impulsive Hermes put her to sleep and violated her immediately in the snow fields of Mt. Parnassos. She gave birth to Autolykos, the “wolf-itself” who, true to his father’s nature was a master thief (he could steal anything within his grasp) and a liar.

Autolykos was also a cattle thief, and one of his favorite targets was the prize herd of the primeval king of Corinth, Sisyphus, the rogue who outwitted even Death. Sisyphus suspected Autolykos was stealing his cattle but could never catch him. Sisyphus was cunning with words and one of the first to master the use of letters. He poured lead in the hollow of his cow’s hooves so that their tracks left the words “Autolykos has stolen me”.[1]

Autolykos had a daughter by Neaera, daughter of Perseus. He  named his daughter Anticleia. Autolykos was so take by the arch-scoundrel Sisyphus that he befriended him and offered Anticleia to Sisyphus so she might give birth to the most cleaver of all men. Anticleia became pregnant, Autolykos wasn’t interested in having Sisyphus raise the child, so he gave his daughter as wife Laertes, king of Ithaka. Laertes gladly accepted the pregnant girl and became the child’s foster father. Homer describes the naming of this child by his grandfather. The baby’s nurse set him on Autolykos’ knee and told him to name him. Homer tells the story:  

Well, Autolykos

on a trip to Ithaka

arrived just after his daughter’s boy was born.

In fact, he had no sooner finished supper

than Nurse Eurykleia put the baby down

in his own lap and said: “It is for you, now,

to choose a name for him, your child’s dear baby,

the answer to her prayers.”

Autolykos replied:

“My son-in-law, my daughter, call the boy

by the name I tell you. Well you know, my hand

has been against the world of men and women;

odium and distrust I’ve won. Odysseus

should be his given name.[2]  

Autolykos invented the name on the spot using the ancient Greek word, odussomai, (odyssomai), to be wroth against, to hate.[3] Odysseus lived up to his heritage as the great grandson of Hermes god of swift murder, theft and lies; grandson of Autolykos the master thief; and son of Sisyphus the arch-rogue. Odysseus was known as the man of many wiles.

---

Hunger has attacked me like a disease. I haven’t eaten since early morning. By the time I get to bed, all I can think about is breakfast. My bedroom window is open, the fresh air entering in great breaths along with small night noises from the cove far below. I lie in bed with sleep overtaking me, listening to the rustle of wind in the olive trees.

 

17 Oct, Sunday

Roosters speak the same language the world over. I wake to the sound of their voices cracking the morning quiet over the bay. One rooster is close to my room and another is off in the distance with a third further yet. I hear a fourth and now a fifth further around the bay as light invades my room.

On the opposite side of the bay, the rocky hillside is pocked with a scattering of white stones and a layer of thinly-spread brush. The hillside appears deserty, a touch of Arizona.

A bell clangs rapidly down in the plateia. The hum of a ferry motor mixes with the sounds of roosters which were stark earlier but now recede into the background noise of town. I hear a dog bark and a cow in the distance. And now the perennial motorbike. The Sunday morning air is cool and fresh, although I get a whiff of ferry exhaust from far below. A horn blast lofts like a motorbike’s mating call, and a flat-sounding bell is struck rapidly, an endless trail of tones lofting out over the cove followed by silence and then two slow strokes at the end, short periods on a long train of peals. A chorus of men’s voices.

---

For breakfast, I decide on a little waterfront cafe furnished with dark glass tables and black metal chairs. Large mirrors decorate the black walls. In the kitchen to the right of the bar, I hear the clang and bang of pans by the young Greek woman fixing my breakfast, an omelet and bacon. I hear it sizzle. She and I are the only ones in the restaurant.

The woman walks back through the dining room, past me and out the front door then returns from checking on her son who plays beside the street where cars whiz past. He follows her in and stands by me while she delivers my eggs, bacon and toast, a glass of orange juice. His head is just level with the table top. The omelet she and I discussed comes as two eggs sunny-side up. But the bacon is cooked just to my taste, not too crisp and a little chewy. I’ve learned to not trust myself concerning when my next meal will come, so I eat everything on the table, every pad of butter spread on every slice of bread, thick jelly on top. I’ve developed a rather perverse pleasure in tricking myself into skipping meals to lose weight and save money.  

Today is a busy day, a time for taking care of my affairs. I find a supermarket, pickup some bananas and apples, and a Laundry where I drop off some underclothes and my only short-sleeved shirt. I’m a little apprehensive of leaving them at a Greek laundry, but the man who takes them is friendly, professional and speaks a little English.  

---

By mid afternoon and after several hours of waiting, I’ve been told three conflicting times for the bus to Stavros, 11:00 AM, noon and 1:30 PM. All are wrong. The only bus on the island is now used for school children and no longer available for touristas. Most of today is already gone. I’ve thought it over and decided tomorrow I’ll rent a motorbike and have a day racing around the island creating a little noise myself.

In the meantime, I check my guidebook and trek to the Cave of the Nymphs, where Odysseus first reentered Ithaca after twenty years of being away at Troy and wandering the Greek isles.  

I walk past a silo-like building which could be a large beautiful home or church off to itself nestled on a hillside among green shrubs and trees. The blacktop road becomes gravel. I hear the clang of bells and soon a herd of goats appears. I climb a mound of earth at the side of the road and motion to the young dark-haired goatherd that I would like to take a picture. The goats rustle past in a close cluster, the dull clank of their bells reflecting their increased pace as they pass me. The dank skunk-like smell of goat.  

These are descendants of the Kerberus, hound of the Underworld. According to Hesiod, he was an

                       ... unspeakable creature,  
Kerberos, the fifty-headed dog of Hades, 
that mighty and shameless eater of raw flesh, 
whose bark resounds like bronze.[4]

I’ve read that if you bend down to pickup a rock, the dogs of Greece will turn tail and run. This is to be the supreme test of that hypothesis, so I grab a nice throwing-size rock knowing I can never get all of them. Just as my heart hits maximum rate, those dogs hit the end of their chains and thus my life is spared for another day when the dogs may have more freedom. The “turning tail” hypothesis is yet to be tested by me. What’s perhaps of more concern, the story goes on the say Kerberus will let you into Hades but wouldn’t let you out. I’ll encounter these dogs again on the way back.  

---

 

This was the world Odysseus wandered for ten years of wandering, inflicted upon him by the sea god Poseidon in his wrath over Odysseus blinding his won, the one-eyed Cyclops, Polyphemus. He encountered strange creatures, the sirens who lure sailors to their death with their song, and was held in love bondage for seven years by the sea nymph Calypso on the island of Ogygia and eventually descended to the Underworld himself. He encountered Hermes from time to time, but Hermes, in his role as protector of travelers, is not persistent in or conscientious about this responsibility. Odysseus voyage hovered between life and death, sometimes without a helmsman, sometimes at the whim of the wind or thrown overboard and swept about by arbitrary sea currents. But his return home was most telling. While in the care of the Phaiakians just north of Ithaca, he fell asleep after boarding the boat that was to bring him home. He slept the entire voyage in a state of exhaustion, as if his dream world finally became literal as he approached his homeland.

When the Phaiakians reached Ithaca, they left Odysseus asleep on the beach. They also left a great treasure bestowed on him by their king. When he woke, Odysseus no longer recognized his homeland and filled with despair. But gray-eyed Athena, who was always with him in times of trial, came to him disguised as a young shepherd. She wore a cloak off her shoulders and carried a hunting lance. She lifted the mist from Odysseus’ eyes so he could see that the land about him was indeed Ithaca. Then Athena helped him hide his treasure in the Cave of the Nymphs just up the mountainside in front of me.

---

Switchbacks finally bring me to a sign pointing up a stone walkway and promising that the Cave of the Nymphs is further up the mountainside. I’m the only visitor on the road and wonder why others are not at such a famous landmark. The cave and a little green shack are at the top of the walkway. I see why Odysseus needed her help. The cave is two kilometers from the sea.  

Yet I’m alone with the Cave of the Nymphs. I remember Homer’s description of this setting as seen through the eyes of the goddess Athena:

Here is the cove the sea lord Phorkys owns,  
there is the olive spreading out her leaves
over the inner bay, and there the cavern
dusky and lovely, hallowed by the feet
of those immortal girls, the Naiades--
the same wide cave under whose vault you came
to honor them with hekatombs--and there
Mount Neion, with his forest on his back.[5]

The entrance to the cave is a vertical slit the height of a man, a locked iron gate across it. The opening is lined with large white rocks and gradually closes toward the top. I peer inside, see the floor of the cave dropping into blackness. I take a couple of shots with my camera and come back down the hill considerably disappointed.

As with Oedipus, Odysseus’ life becomes another piece of the Rosetta stone whereby we can again go beyond the limits of firsthand self-knowledge. His journey around the Greek isles occurred at mid-life, a time when many of us wander aimlessly, encountering a bizarre world we no longer understand, blown about our own lives by renegade winds without a helmsman to guide us. When we do finally return home, it’s as though we are awakening from a dream. We’ve been given a great gift that will sustain us for the rest of our days if we accept it. But the return is painful. The world we return to has changed, plundered by those we trusted, and those we love, lured away from us.

I haven’t been as lucky as Odysseus. I lost my wife, lost my home, lost my job, lost everything. I can’t find my way home, not the one I had before I started drifting.

As I pass the three vicious dogs, I pick up another rock, not caring if they are chained. A man comes up the hill toward me. As we draw closer, I speak my Greek greeting, “Gaia saV,” and he asks if I speak English. I tell him that I speak American English and he smiles, says he’s German. He’s headed to the Cave of the Nymphs. He has on gray shorts, tennis shoes and a short sleeve white shirt. He knows the cave is locked but believes we can get in anyway. I turn around, and we climb the hill together.

He’s a doctor and at one time worked for several years in Saudi Arabia where he learned English. He’s seventy-two but looks much younger, slim and fit. Though it’s not late, the light is fading as the sun falls behind the mountain. The iron gate has a pad lock on the left side which intimidated me, but the right side is totally free. One has but to swing the gate open, which the good doctor does. He crawls through the opening while I attached my camera flash.

The goddess turned and entered the dim cave,  
exploring it for crannies, while Odysseus
carried up all the gold, the fire-hard bronze,
and well-made clothing the Phaiakians gave him.[6]

At this landing, the cave is still small but perhaps half again the height of a man and the far wall, five strides into the mountain. To the left, green metal stairs descend steeply.

We allow our eyes to adjust to the darkness and with me in the lead, we descend the stairs. Or at least, I think the doctor is behind me, but when I step from the metal stairs onto the soft earth, he’s still at the top peering down. The flashlight worked fine on the stairs and now works better on the dark sides of the cave as my eyes continue to adjust. 

The doctor finally joins me, so I shine the light on the green stairs as he descends. I shine the light around the walls of the room, into recesses which if explored might lead to other passageways and other rooms, rooms even darker than this, which my flashlight can barely light. He and I talk of how neither of us would have descended the stairs if we had come alone. We stand for a while watching the beam of light, neither of us willing to proceed along the thin planks that provide a walkway over the hole in the floor, both of us using the courage we find in the presence of another to remain within the cave.

When we leave, he ascends further up the hill, and I descend through dark olive trees with large gnarled trunks, past the vicious but chained dogs, past chickens, sheep and stacks of used lumber, past a flock of black turkeys with huge oval bodies, black feathers and small red heads, turkeys which stand their ground in the middle of the road. They gobble but don’t acknowledge my presence there in the deepening shadows of evening on the hillside where Odysseus and the goddess Athena hid his treasure in the Cave of the Nymphs before he went home disguised as a beggar with mass murder on his mind.

As I descend the gravel road down the dark mountain, I think about the German doctor. He would have been twenty-four when World War II ended. He could have fought for six years, fought Americans, killed Americans. Yet we had stood next to each other, used each other’s presence to ward off the fear of darkness and the Underworld.

---

I have dinner at a grill in the plateia, pork slices, a Greek salata and a Sprite. More than I should eat when you consider the mound of French fries and bread. I leave a slice. This is my first food since breakfast. I eat inside watching the fat man cook, spits of chicken turning, lamb and pork sizzling in the background, kids running in and out, women coming to get the family dinner. While the man cooks at the grill, his teenage daughter runs in and sticks two red roses in the top of his T-shirt, throws her arms around his neck. He looks down into her smiling face, his expression never changing. His wife enters and busies herself waiting tables.

---

A man has moved into the other bed room just across the entryway. He’s from Italy. I hear Verdi blasting from his room. He’s short, plump, full of laughter and has the worst breath I’ve ever smelled on a human being, saturated with wine and garlic.

I sit at the table in my room writing in my journal. The landlady’s daughter stops by on the walkway out front, puts her elbows on the windowsill and says a few words to me. I look out through a pitch dark evening at lights that line the cove, listen to the rumble of a ferry in the bay, a motorbike up the street and a dog barking in the distance. The window is simply open, the two halves rotated in, the shutters pushed out, no screen. The sky hangs like a black sheet. The air, cool, refreshing. The bay glistens with vertical streaks of bright city lights dancing in its ripples.

---

Hesiod personified night and placed Night’s gloomy home in Hades, the Underworld:

               ... the harmful Night, veiled in dusky fog,
carries in her arms Sleep, Death’s own brother.
There, too, dwell the children of black Night,
Sleep and Death, the awesome gods who are never seen
by the rays of the blazing sun when it rises
on the sky, or moves on its downward path.
Of these, the one wanders over land and broad-backed sea,
ever at peace and ever gentle to mortals,
but the other, a ghoul even the gods detest,
has a heart of iron and feelings hard as bronze,
and no man gripped by him can free himself again.[7]

The night I went to bed with Fred, shortly after I drifted off to sleep, I woke suddenly. Fred had hold of me, hands tight on my hips. His head was at my bellybutton, his face working down into private territory, his breath hot and rapid under the covers. I remember the frightening strength of his hands. I spoke his name with a tone of irritation, and he released me and turned quickly away. I laid there with a strange feeling creeping over me. Had I been dreaming? Was Fred really doing something sexual? I finally dismissed his conduct as some sort of sleep aberration and went back to sleep myself. That was the only incident during the night, although now it seems he may have made another attempt. I was asleep, and thirty-two years is a long time.

Early the next morning, our young cousin’s father called my father complaining about the “after dinner snacks,” as my uncle put it, Fred had been soliciting down the hall the night before. What followed is the most bizarre episode of my life. My father called my brother into the living room and asked if what our young cousin had said was true, if blowjobs had been on Fred’s desert menu. My brother confirmed it with a sinking look in his eyes like the life had just drained out of him. The word “blowjob” laid on the floor like a writhing snake.

For the second time in two months, my father and I stood in the living room confronting a life and death situation. I was facing the hall in the direction of my brother who was facing me, his eyes vacant but water filled. My older cousin, the fighter, was standing to my right, finger tips in the tops of his Levis. My father had just come from talking on the telephone in the kitchen and was standing to my left with my mother standing in the kitchen doorway behind him. No words can describe the emotional state of my father. As for me, I had just passed into a strange surrealistic world from which a part of me has never returned. The realization my father had been right about not allowing Fred in our home fell on me like a death blow.

Fred was down the hall still in my bedroom. My father turned to me and made the strangest request I’ve ever had made of me. The look in his eyes was that of a rabid dog. “Let’s kill him,” he said, already leaning toward the hall. I felt a surge of emotion go through my body powerful enough to dim the light in my eyes. I almost fainted. I had but to make a move forward, and he and I would rush down the hall and kill a man I had known for two full years and until that instant had considered my friend. My response was immediate, impulsive and I’ve regretted it every since.

“No, Dad, let’s not kill him.”

I’ve never understood why my words stopped my father. He looked confused, disoriented. “What should we do with him then?” he asked, as if since we weren’t going to kill him, he had no idea what to do. I felt our roles switch, me the father, he the son. “Get him out of here,” I said. Then my older cousin, standing to my right, took a step forward. “I’ll get rid of him” he said. “And if he won’t go, I’ll beat the shit out of him.” My father agreed to this. “Okay,” he said, you two get rid of him. If I go in there, I’ll kill him.”

We did. My cousin and I walked to the back bedroom where Fred and I had slept together, and we told Fred in no uncertain terms he was no longer welcome in our home. Fred didn’t seem concerned at all. He nonchalantly started packing his suitcase, folding his clothes like maybe that afternoon sometime he’d leave. “You don’t understand, you dumb cocksucker,” my cousin told him. “Your life is in danger. Get the hell out of here.” Still he packed in what seemed like slow motion. After he got his clothes in his suitcase, he was going to walk out through the living room, but we shoved him out the back door.

I was in the living room, living the reality of the disaster I’d created, when my father went to the window and in a quivering voice, told Fred as he opened his car door that he could just as easily be leaving with a bullet in him, and if he ever came back again, he would personally put one in him. My father was like a lion with his fresh kill resurrected and still on the hoof in front of him. If he’d known the full truth, he would have killed Fred and no words from me could have stopped him. But if I had known the full truth, I would have too, at least at the time I thought so.

---

The wind howls tonight. I hear it in the olive trees, brushing and twisting them. I hear singing, faint voices from the church. They’re carried by the wind, or is it just the sound of the wind? They’re louder now. Yes, it’s voices. The many voices of the wind.

 

18 Oct, Tuesday

I wake early, well before dawn, dreaming of a woman with a hard life in a traveling circus. I try to help her. Perhaps it’s the four-day stands in each Greek town that reminds me of a circus. I’m not sleeping well, but I feel well if a little confused. The roosters are confused too. They’ve been at it all night.

I feel safe here in Greece, and I’ve found a new courage in traveling alone. I accept rides from strangers, take buses and ferries to places I’ve never been where I don’t even speak the language. The doors and windows to my room remain unlocked at night. I leave all my valuables on the tabletop. But I’m concerned that my landlady might put another person in here with me since the room has two beds. I don’t like another man even in the same room.

I’ve retrieved my underclothes and shirt from the cleaners and everything is very professionally cleaned. At least something has gone right today, but to get to the site of the ancient city of Odysseus, I decide to try a taxi. I negotiate with a huge dark Greek who worked as a cook in New York City for several years and speaks excellent English. He won’t budge and wants to charge me 2500 dr ($10.80) one way. After trying to talk to another taxi driver who doesn’t even have the time to mess with me, I accept the first taxi driver’s offer. I’ll have to find my own ride back. “Won’t be a problem,” he says.

Being in an automobile again is a treat in itself. I feel as though I’m in a hang glider hovering above the skinny spine of the isthmus with the ocean far below on each side of the car. We arrive in Stavros, a sleepy little village on a hill overlooking a bay. After I pay him, my driver walks toward an outdoor restaurant to visit with a small group of locals sitting in the shade.

In Homer’s Iliad, Priam the king of Troy asks Helen about one of the Greek generals as he viewed their army from within the walls of Troy:

                                  “Tell me, dear child,  
who is that officer? The son of Atreus [Agamemnon]
stands a head taller, but this man appears
to have a deeper chest and broader shoulders.
His gear lies on the ground, but still he goes
like a bellwether up and down the ranks.
A ram I’d call him, burly, thick with fleece,
keeping a flock of silvery sheep in line.

Helen shaped by heaven answered him:
“That is Laertes’ son, the great tactician
Odysseus. He was bred on Ithaka,
a bare and stony island, but he knows
all manner of stratagems and moves in war.”[8]

Antenor, a respected Trojan elder of conservative temperament standing with Priam and Helen, then told them of  meeting Odysseus years before when he came to Troy with Menelaus seeking the return of Helen. Antenor describes the encounter:

“Once long ago he came here, great Odysseus,  
with Menelaos--came to treat of you.
They were my guests, and I made friends of both
and learned their stratagems and characters.
Among us Trojans, in our gatherings, Menelaos,
broad in the shoulders likewise, overtopped him;
seated, Odysseus looked the kinglier man.
When each of them stood up to make his plea,
his argument before us all, then Menelaos
said a few words in a rather headlong way,
but clearly, not long-winded and not vague;
and indeed he was the younger of the two.
Then in his turn the great tactician rose
and stood and looked at the ground,
moving the staff before him not at all
forward or backward; obstinate and slow
of wit he seemed, gripping the staff; you’d say
some surly fellow, with an empty head.
But when he launched the strong voice from his chest,
and words came driving on the air as thick
and fast as winter snowflakes, then Odysseus
could have no mortal rival as an orator!
The look of him no longer made us wonder.”[9]

After Athena and Odysseus stored his treasure in the cave of the Nymphs, she disguised him in the manners and dress of a beggar, so he might return to his kingdom incognito, and he entered his fields surreptitiously to regain the confidence of his goatherd and son, and have them help him slay his wife’s suitors. He left the cove, took a stony trail and walked to the high hills where his trustworthy swineherd lived. From him, Odysseus learned of his wife’s fidelity and also met his son who had grown into a young man during the twenty years Odysseus was away. Telemachus was wide-eyed, awed by his father demeanor. Penelope had resisted the suitors for three years by saying she would choose another husband when she finished weaving a shroud for her would-be father-in-law. She wove the shroud during the day and unwove it at night.  

The road winds down several switchbacks. I find the beach, windswept and deserted except for a lone man in a red swimsuit coming out of the water alongside a wood dock. He has black hair and a deep tan. I speak to him in Greek. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I only speak English.”  

I ask him if he knows where I can find the ruins of the ancient city, and he tells me it was visible until 1953 when it submerged during a tremendous earthquake. He points out into the water. “It’s out there,” he says, “fifty feet down.” He’s been swimming in the bay but discourages me from doing so because of the trash blown in by the stiff breeze. “The water’s filthy,” he  says. 

When we get to Stavros, he introduces me to one of the restaurant owners who also drives the town’s taxi. I make an appointment to meet him at the restaurant at five o’clock, shake hands with the young man from South Africa and walk up a side street to the town’s small museum which sits on the sight where archeologists believe Odysseus’ castle stood.

Odysseus and his son plotted the murder of his wife’s suitors then left for his palace, entering separately so as not to draw attention. Outside the gates, Odysseus saw the dog he had trained as a puppy twenty years before. The old dog lay on a dung pile full of flies. Upon seeing his master after twenty years, he wagged his tail once and died. Odysseus entered his castle:

                                   ... Odysseus came  
through his own doorway as a mendicant,
humped like a bundle of rags over his stick.
He settled on the inner ashwood sill,
leaning against the doorjamb--cypress timber
the skilled carpenter planed years ago
and set up with a plumbline.[10]

 

She tells me to take a seat, the only other chair in the room, and pumps me for information about myself. She’s thrilled I can speak a little Greek and has me say a few words of hello to the Greek woman who smiles sheepishly. “She’s embarrassed because she speaks no English,” the fat lady says. The Greek woman then leaves and the curator talks to me before showing me around the small museum. “It’s seldom I get a tourist who knows something about Greek mythology,” she says. “I usually have to tell them the story of Odysseus and they never understand the significance of the artifacts. Tell me about yourself. What’s your profession?”

She gives me a guided tour of the museum, explaining where the artifacts were found, pausing longer on those from the Mycenaean period, the age of Odysseus. She stops at one shard, saying, “This is the only evidence connecting Odysseus with the island.” She points to a small gray piece of pottery with the faint words “Bless Odysseus” in ancient Greek. “This is the most important artifact ever found on the island.” She apologizes several times for not allowing me to take pictures. “It’s forbidden,” she says begging forgiveness with sad cocker spaniel eyes.

As I pick up my daypack and camera case, she follows me to the door. “Wait for me to lock up,” she says. “I’ll drive you back to Stavros.” She has trouble setting the alarm. “It’s new but more trouble than it’s worth. The wind sets it off.”  As she drives back to town, she wants to know more of my work as an aerospace engineer, so I tell her of the NASA earth-imaging radar which I coordinated with the Germans and the Italians for three years and which is suppose to go into orbit with the Space Shuttle next April. When she reaches the center of Stavros, she stops her VW beetle in the shade of a large olive tree. “You’re a man of some importance,” she says, “aren’t you?” “Not really,” I reply. “I’m unemployed.” We shake hands, but she won’t turn mine loose. “You’ve had a long career in aerospace, worked on very important programs. You are a man of considerable importance.”

When she finally lets go, I walked off wondering why she needed me to be so important, but reveling in the praise she heaped on me. It’s nice to go from a man who can’t even rent a motorbike to one “of considerable importance,” all in a matter of hours.  

Sitting in the warm shade watching the sun bake the brushwood on the hillsides, I realize I am very tired. I put my head down on the table and nap right were I sit.

---

After sizing up the threat from his wife’s suitors and even testing her faithfulness, Odysseus strung his bow, nodded to his son and put an arrow through the leader’s throat, thus starting the blood bath. Homer describes the first suitor’s death:

Backward and down he went, letting the wine cup fall
from his shocked hand. Like pipes his nostrils jetted
crimson runnels, a river of mortal red,
and one last kick upset his table
knocking the bread and meat to soak in dusty blood.[11]

Following the slaughter of the suitors, on the steps of the palace he hanged twelve of Penelope’s female servants, the fair maids who had slept with them on the quiet:

He tied one end of a haswer to a pillar
and passed the other about the roundhouse top,
taking the slack up, so that no one’s toes
could touch the ground. They would be hung like doves
or larks in springes triggered in a thicket,
where the birds think to rest--a cruel nesting.
So now in turn each woman thrust her head
into a noose and swung, yanked high in air,
to perish there most piteously.
Their feet danced for a little, but not long.[12]

Thus was justice served by Odysseus 3200 years ago near what is today Stavros, island of Ithaca. Odysseus look their lives as easily as Hermes turned the old man to stone.

Penelope, Helen’s cousin, had proven herself the most faithful of women, and her name is synonymous with fidelity to this day.

---

In the late afternoon with the sun casting long shadows, I wait for my taxi back to Vathi. I fight the flies for my dinner at the little restaurant across the street. A very good cheese omelet (a real omelet this time) with German sausage, two slices of tomato, several wedges of cucumber and toast. A big black and white tomcat glares at me from under a nearby table.

Finally the taxi driver comes. On the drive back, he says you have to milk the goats and chickens too to make ends meet in Ithaca. His son is in the Greek army and his daughter works. He says Ithaca is overrun by tourists in the summer. The patio in front of his restaurant has fifty chairs. He says it’s packed in the summer. I was the only customer today.

---

In early evening with a light wind rustling leaves along the dark cement stairs, I return to my room.  The stairs start one block off the main road along the dock. They come in sets of four with a gentle slope of cement path in between. Twenty-two sets of these steps and slopes make two forty-five degree turns. I’m huffing and puffing. Then comes a steep cement walkway, laterally grooved for traction. This slope is ninety-six strides with no turns. Next, a turn to the left, twenty-five more stair steps to the front of the church, another left turn under the shade of tall oak trees and a very gentle slope of gravel which levels off to twenty meters of shaded alley behind homes. I’ve broken a good sweat. Then back into the sunlight and a sharp right turn up four steps through a green metal gate beside the home where I stay, another set of eight steps, a 180 degree turn and up another set of four steps to the balcony. One more right turn and I’m there, high above the sea and town which are both visible through olive trees. Purple and yellow snapdragons line the walkway. The steps are lined with pink and blue periwinkles. Through my window, I see a bush of pure-white roses winding up from below.

---

She invites me down to the patio to sit in the dark and look out over the lights of the plateia. She shoves a bowl of grapes in front of me, fresh off the vines above our heads, while telling me of their new boarder, the Italian with the bad breath.

I plan to leave Ithaca early in the morning so I pay my bill. My room is more expensive than I thought. They charge me 8,500 dr ($36.95) for three nights. The room was 2,500 per night instead of 2,000 as I had been told. What the extra 1,000 is for I don’t know, and I don’t speak enough Greek to find out. They must be charging me for the grapes and the cocoa, possibly even the dab of preserves they served the night I first arrived, maybe even the well water. The daughter takes care of the finances, but she doesn’t have correct change. She owes me 500 dr. She tells me she will give me change after dinner. I think about her words for a while and wonder if she’s telling me to bring change after I eat dinner. But I’ve already eaten. I won’t have the time to solve this problem in the morning. I catch the ferry back to Patras at 7:00 AM.

The mother gets a plastic bottle of well water for me, says “kalinicta” and they retire for the evening leaving me alone on the patio.

---

The afternoon following Fred’s sudden and forced departure, my cousin’s young wife got the rest of the story out of my brother. During his trip to Disneyland, Fred had repeatedly raped him. Fred had threatened my brother, said if he told anyone what he was doing to him, he would kill him. The threat and the demand for sex had been repeated down the hall the previous night. Fred told my brother, “I know you think you could hide from me, but if you ever tell anyone, I’ll kill you even if it’s twenty years from now.” What had happened down the hall the night before was not as I perceived it. Fred wasn’t cutting up with those two kids.

After the full story came out, my father was angry I had stopped him from killing Fred, but he didn’t hold a grudge. We decided my cousin and I would go to Bakersfield, find Fred and “beat the living shit out of him.” This would be my chance to redeem myself. My mother was against us going and kept saying, “Don’t kill him. He’s not worth ruining your life over.”

On the way to Bakersfield, I suffered from the highest anxiety of my life. I was the embodiment of a scream that couldn’t come out. I didn’t want to beat up Fred. I didn’t feel angry. I was terrified. But we couldn’t find Fred, and finally at my urging we went to the police. They picked him up the next day. They couldn’t prosecute him for molesting my brother because he was fifteen and beyond the age where molestation laws applied. Homosexual rape didn’t exist then. The crucial factor was his threat on my brother’s life. But they could get the son of a bitch deported. And they did. It just took a little longer than I expected.

---

I go to sleep early, but shortly a commotion outside wakes me. I hear kid’s voices and people moving about inside the house. People shouting. A motorbike buzzes the neighborhood.

I’ve been dreaming of Romania. The friends I met in Athens wanted me to visit them in Bucharest. I’m afraid of my dreams and what they might mean for me in the future, what kind of trouble my newfound courage might get me into. I turn on the light to write in my journal.

Hermes is the god who brings sleep, opens the world of dreams and wakes us in the morning. A close association exists between the world of sleep and the Underworld, and Hermes is comfortable in both. In his role as guide of souls, Hermes took responsibility of Penelope’s suitors after they departed earth and led them along the misty path to their new home:

     ... the suitors’ ghosts were called away  
by Hermes of Kyllene, bearing the golden wand
with which he charms the eyes of men or wakens
who he wills.
                        He waved them on, all squeaking
as bats will in a cavern’s underworld,
all flitting, flitting crisscross in the dark
if one falls and the rock-hung chain is broken.
So with faint cries the shades trailed after Hermes,
pure Deliverer.
                        He led them down dank ways,
over gray Ocean tides, the Snowy Rock,
past shores of Dream and narrows of the sunset,
in swift flight to where the dead inhabit
wastes of asphodel at the world’s end.[13]

Homer doesn’t mention what happened to the souls of the fair maids.

Roosters start crowing. I hear at least six at varying distances from me including one just outside. Perhaps it’s the light from my window confusing them. The one closest me started it all.

Slowly, they give it up.

 

19 Oct, Wednesday

My wristwatch alarm goes off at 6 AM, and as I surface from the sea of sleep, I realize someday I will be dead, this consciousness I call myself nonexistent. The realization is profound and comes as a stroke of enlightenment. This is not a normal intellectual awareness that someday I will die, but some deep primordial, perhaps cosmic understanding. I’ve had it before, but this morning it seems to have a special relation to my journey, as if I’ve already experienced a death of sorts, and now I’m unattached, drifting in space. My journey is simply an earthly manifestation of what has already occurred internally. Though I’m not frightened, I have a consuming sense of loss.

But I’m up a little late for my leisurely pace, and suddenly I’m frantic to finish packing. After zipping my backpack, I sit on the edge of the bed hurriedly slipping on my socks and hiking boots, realizing I’d better get a move on or I’ll miss the ferry.

---

When Helen of Sparta, the world’s most beautiful woman, became of marriageable age, she was besieged by suitors. Her father was afraid his daughter’s choice would cause a fight among those she had rejected. The suitors were full of murderous feelings toward one another. Odysseus was one of Helen’s suitors, but realizing she would undoubtedly pick his wealthy brother Menelaus, he struck a bargain with her father. Odysseus, the man of many wiles, suggested he make all the suitors vow to defend Helen’s chosen husband against any harm which would come to him because of his marriage. Her father took Odysseus’ advice and in return saw to it Odysseus received Penelope, Helen’s cousin, as his own bride. Penelope was the epitome of loyalty and fidelity. Not so Helen.

The vow binding Helen’s suitors soon became the active force which united the Greek kingdoms in war against Troy. Paris, a prince of Troy, came to Sparta on a visit, and stole Helen. Even though she went willingly, Menelaus held the suitors to their vow. Odysseus wasn’t interested in leaving Ithaca to fight a war, so he feigned insanity. When the herald came to Ithaca to get him, they found him wearing the headgear of a madman and sewing salt with a horse and an ox yoked to his plow.[14] They took him anyway.

My path will cross Odysseus’ again when I get to Troy, but now I’m headed to Olympia, where the Olympic games originated almost three thousand years ago, and where Oedipus’ father, Laios, was raised and where he kidnapped Pelop’s illegitimate son, Chrysippus.

---

The winds I heard last night out my window, work the sea today. The ferry rocks from side to side, and I hear waves breaking on the bow. 

This is the second time they’ve been to Greece. They’ve been here two weeks and are leaving for Holland Thursday. He tells me some experts believe Kefallonia is the Ithaca of antiquity, not the island I was just on. We stand at the rail with the brisk breeze blowing our hair watching Ithaca float past and Kefallonia drift into view. The sea calms as we come closer to port. They exit the ferry.

The ferry is full of dark-haired, olive-skinned Greeks. Most Greeks do not lose their hair, it simply turns gray and even that, late in life. The many families onboard are a mixture of old people and younger family members. They travel as a group. Rarely do I see a lone Greek. The Lone Ranger, whom I grew up listening to on the radio, was not Greek. Before I left Colorado I was told by some Greek friends that Greeks are very affectionate with each other, that they hug, kiss and shake hands a lot, and that they argue constantly. I’ve not seen it.

Men sit around a small open bar in the middle of the enclosed passenger area sipping Greek coffee from tiny plastic cups. Every time the waiter makes a coffee, the machine sounds like a man clearing his throat, but louder, more drawn out. I sit close to the front of the ferry this time in the no smoking section. I didn’t realize it had one.