“You Americans need to step out of yourselves, we like you people,” George White Eye[1] insisted, his own focus lit wide, wider than the small room in which I lay. I cannot respond with his fingers inside my mouth. “You understand what I say?”
I nod impatiently, just wanting to get on with it. The excruciating pain above my left front tooth transcends any ability or desire toward sophist retorts on national character, his or mine. I am there, in Greece, after all, and not to criticize my country from afar, though it occurs to me through the pain and the short, thick fingers bracing themselves against my stubble, maybe to understand it better.
I had lived on the island of Syros just long enough to need this hotelier-dentist, for him to twist his expressions of the Greek people around his explanation of how he was no longer a priest. “I was devoted more than I tried to be to the natural separation, the mystery of the fall of man. It’s not for you, it’s not even for us, it belongs to itself, like these dogs that roam around Ermoupolis.” He laughed.
It. What a self-contained anachronism, only permitted breath within, presumed to exhale and sustain life without. The interchangeable third person bears more than a passing relation to the Trinity, looking up from a rock on the third celestial body. I need anesthesia and I need it now. He looks, pokes around the tender gum. My fear is having the front tooth pulled, and being so far away from everything this void would become the center of it all. I search his wide eyes, silently plead for him just give it to me straight.
But then through the throbbing I peek just beyond my wandering the beautiful island with a missing front tooth. When I have traveled a long way, I am able conjure distance in transcendent form, that jumbled mass of time and space. Especially as tracked-over, conquered, abandoned, bought and re-opened again as the character of an ancient seaside village. The Venetians had built the town that became Ermoupolis, and their influence had traveled well. Every direction I looked, toward every crevice from which sound emanated, the essence of time, salt-washed and air-dried, appeared only to vanish again like elusive wisdom. I had come a long way only to witness my own minimal progress, but George folded this, too, into the admonitions that would become the sound track to afternoons in the Metamorfossi.
“There’s nothing wrong with the tooth – you’ve had a root canal there. Do you understand what I am saying?” I had tried to tell him this very thing he then reports back to me as news. Perhaps it had slipped our attention on the way up to his office in the rundown of qualifications that included his extended flirtation with the priesthood. The ordeal, which I assumed to be ongoing, had seemed to make him both more and less credentialed as a dentist. “You may have some sinus infection impacting your gums. I can give you anti-biotics, but….” he shook his head. This pain was to be mine for the near term. I eye the worry beads sitting listless on his desk.
Over the weeks that followed we met often on the small streets around the Metamorforssi, but we only spoke at this one estatorio, NH∑IΩTO∏OYΛA, between serving hours, over ouzo or coffee, and often both. He made the most out of our difference in years and culture; his classic opening was to explain the origins of a particular English word in Greek, making a point early on to include philo, which he called friend. It became a sort of anteroom for us, before moving on to the main space. In that way it was the overlapping subject connecting one meeting to the next. Overheard conversations being what they were, George makes peculiar reference to the history of specific buildings, people who pass. He points out the waitress who is a prostitute and a psychology student, for example. ‘There are only a certain amount of women on the island,” he explained, the white of his eyes inflated by pressed lips into a small sea around the iris.
The Metamorfossi is a densely populated little quarter with narrow streets and stairs dissecting blocks of buildings to form a sort of amphitheatre down to the harbor. The church around which it is anchored, Metamorfossi tou Sotiros, Transfiguration of the Savior, stands off the side street Omirou, flanked on one side by a small garden and approached from all directions by different little streets of steps. Construction on the Orthodox cathedral began in 1824 and was finalized in 1831; several ancient buildings were razed to make room for it. A basilica of three naves, the name of its architect has been lost though its design conforms to the model of the Panaghia of Tinos. George talks directly to me within its shadow. “We don’t finish one thing and then start another,” but I know what he means. He speaks directly, much as others might speak around things, and returns to a similar subject, but by its various approaches often seems new. The Greek way, whether in eating, talking, swimming, listening, or growing vegetables without water, gives his eyes their widest reach as we converge on the heart of a new difference between old and new, between Greece and everything else. The very first time we spoke it was of Athens and how similar to a foreigner might be the phrases ‘view to the acropolis’ and ‘view of the apocalypse.’ A foreigner listening or a Greek trying to speak the foreigner’s language, I tried to interject. Then my front tooth thing came up. I hope I understand him correctly.
So many estatorios dot the side streets of the neighborhood that we’re never completely out of earshot of the clanging of silver and glass, reverberating against the marble streets more so even than the other quarters Psariana and Vaporia with their cafés and conversations. There’s a natural symbiosis, the sound of basic needs and their promotion. The earliest reference to Syros is in Homer’s Odyssey, where narration by the shepherd Eumeos implies a Phoenician cultural influence. The island’s name itself may be derived from two Phoenician roots: Ousyra-Ousoura, meaning happy or Syr, meaning rock. The name of Finikas, both a village and a bay in the southwest of the island, may be derived from the Phoenician word for palm.
The cathedral bell towers keep time, exchanging their ephemeral timbre on the hour and releasing the Syriots of the duty though many fine jewelers profit selling watches to visitors enamored of the custom but unused to its habit. At precisely four o’clock one afternoon my path intersects that of an Orthodox priest on the sidewalk in his black vestments and I have to wonder whether there might be some physician of utility residing beneath his black cap.
Syros is one of many islands that make up the Cycladaes, the group of islands encircling the sacred island of Delos, whose importance as a religious site goes back to the Neolithic Age. The cyclic arrangement of the other islands around Delos lends the Cycladaes their collective identity.
Together with Sifinos and Tinos, Syros belongs to a singular belt of rock formations along the same crystalline massif that shows very high grade Blueschist facies metamorphism, the result of solid-state crystallization of basalt with rocks of similar composition at very high pressures and low temperatures. The common assemblage of rock on these islands includes garnet and white mica; the high-pressure metamorphism provides consistent Potassium-Argon mineral.
After changing hands many times since the early Bronze Age (c. 4000-3000 BCE) Syros came under Venetian domination in the early thirteenth century, and its significant Roman Catholic population maintained the Greek language. George and I can see the Neorion shipyard, one of the oldest in Greece, on our walk down Methodiou toward the harbor. “In the British cemetery they buried the war dead, but in the Catholic cemetery only the onions grow,” White eyes widen as they do on our way to the estatorio. “Now let us come have some ouzo and fresh beets.”
Local and only recently out of the ground, their sweetness is rounded up by the olive oil like an inflated estimate of possible taste, a specialty of the house. Eggplant salad and a basket of dry bread between us, George reports on his morning at the clinic where he fixes the teeth of locals. “It is peculiar to us Greeks, you understand me, that people come halfway across the world to relax. If you want to relax, you just go home or to the café for a coffee.”
I’m somehow sure he’s not referring to me, though he never asks exactly what it is I’m doing there. Maybe he knows, or only I see this as a requirement. His English is far better than my Greek, though there are gaps, sufficient for me to turn into something in the midst of unthinking. Something between what he means and what I understand, held together apart with the small lack of effort that is the seized space of reply, where the freedom to choose always arrives a few moments before us. The familiarity and willingness to the talk are its olive oil and we pour liberal doses upon whatever comes up. An allowance is made not for thought or feeling, but for their nameless master. We take a low road, that of the man and donkey fetching neighborhood garbage from plastic bags tied to windows sills, tightening the 21st century glare into simply a greater Common Era. Like no next or previous exists we serve the present just to let it, too, slip away.
The Greeks call the steady firmness of mind ‘euthymia’; the Roman philosopher Seneca, lover of wisdom, referred to it as tranquility, assuring us from the past that there is no need to imitate and reproduce the form of Greek words. He should try to explain this to a failed priest. But Seneca insisted on some term that could find its way on the sense but beyond the form of Greek words. His point on euthymia was that we should be seeking how the mind can follow a smooth and steady course, well disposed to itself. This would be no less, as Seneca did not fail to point out, than a communal remedy.
“The whole failing must be dragged out into the open.” George White Eye lifts his glass but only for a second, giving me opportunity to rid myself of the need for clarifications. For one man or all, he lets appointments stand in their own way, and this kind of transformation, occurring at a gentle yet continuous and thereby almost invisible rate, adds urgency to the change by grafting onto us an affection for a state of affairs doomed to oblivion.
“But what is that, oblivion? You use the word emphasis, that’s a Greek word,” and it seems to settle things for a moment. “See, you Americans are afraid of the wrong things. Passing into pages of history is not such a bad thing; look at your Indians, for example. Ruins are a very important part of this culture.”
We are able, from our table, to glance without strain toward Ano Syros, the small Catholic enclave dating from the fourteenth century built into one of the two hills that form the backdrop to Ermoupolis. It overlooks the city like a junior sentry to the more grand Orthodox cathedral Anastasis towering over the Vrontado quarter from an adjacent hill. Catholics greatly outnumbered the orthodox on the island even into the seventeenth century, but the ancient gates to the small city stand open, without any semblance of doors.
Whether I’m living there to further my graps of a standing culture or I just working on my tan, I am becoming something else not either of these, poised between both. They are necessary cohabitants, not cancelling each other out but each fetching crucial provisions – beams from an ancient sun. I lean back. My chair squeaks. The church bells chime. My glass seals a new spot on an outdoor café table. Free dogs bark, or grant silent passage. A precious commodity of water is made and made again, without rainfall or miracles, and an idea occurs to me about not having to break the laws of the physical world just to tell a story. Transformations can never be entirely complete.
Slowly, on the arm of an unholy dentist, my tooth begins to feel better.
[1] Aspromatis
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