Olympia

THE RUNNERS

I leaned against the gate which led into the house of Phidias. Several glasses of the local wine, together with the local sun, had made me somewhat drowsy. I slid to the ground and rested, my back against the gate, in a fairly comfortable sitting position. The air was on fire. There were pine trees everywhere.

Nikos and I had come up that morning on a funny little slow train from Pyrgos. We’d passed the time watching the farmer in the front of the coach who was trying to keep track of his countless chickens and to haggle with the train conductor over the price of the ticket at the same time. Before he got off at his destination and disappeared in a cloud of feathers, he gave us several fresh eggs and an invaluable lesson on how to deal with train conductors. My vocabulary of Greek curses and insults was also vastly enriched from having listened to him.

About halfway to Olympia, I turned around and saw that two Gypsy women had settled themselves in the seats behind ours.

‘Give me a cigarette; one of them said, reaching out her hand. The Gypsies do not make a big thing of the word please; somehow, I like that.

‘Give us another; said the other.

The idea that it was their right simply to ask for what they desired was strangely refreshing. You needn’t beg or plead; you merely state your case. Either you get the cigarette or you don’t. You laugh, you cry, today is today.

Just as we were approaching Olympia, I turned around to have a word with them, and they were gone. I didn’t recall the train having stopped since the time I gave them the cigarettes. I smiled to myself. I loved and envied those two perfume-laden, black-haired, wild-eyed ladies. I wished that I could move with their ease through a world of pure sunlight, a world as golden and seductive as the earrings they wore.

And disappear from a train that does not even stop.

Suddenly everything was green, and there were pine needles all over the place. The shops in the town were full of plates and egg-cups made from a pine wood so fragrant that you wouldn’t dare eat from them. Blankets so gorgeous you wouldn’t dare sleep with them. Shawls you wouldn’t dare wear.

In the cafés, the inevitable countless cats waited under the tables for bits of salata or souvlakia or anything edible. Then we spotted a familiar-looking red polka-dotted kerchief; we tried to duck out of sight. Too late; they’d seen us. It was the insanely enthusiastic American couple we’d met the night before in Pyrgos. They had brought their car from New York and were Doing Greece, only they were having trouble finding it. The night before, they had completely lost Olympia, and when we had them they were less than an hour away from the place, they had almost died. Now here they were again, waving madly from the café for us to join them.

We cheerfully waved back, made like we were in a mad hurry, and continued on our way.

I had to see the Hermes of Praxiteles before I could even breathe, so we plunged into the museum and frantically wended our way to the special room where the Hermes is kept. I’d seen many photographs of the statue before, and read a number of descriptions of it — but nothing had prepared me for the total shock which I experienced in the inner room.

My previous conceptions of the male body went up in flame, smoke, or whatever. I saw the purest form of a man rejoicing in itself, totally at one with itself, almost sickeningly pleased with itself. The big toes drove me mad, until I got to the ankles, at which point I was on the verge of an epileptic fit. I proceeded to the calves, telling myself that I must take one day at a time. Wisely, I overlooked the knees, because I realized that I must save my strength for the thighs. Encountering the thighs, I gasped at the delicate veins insinuating their way through the marble flesh.

I walked slowly round and round, carefully avoiding the torso and its components. (The components are left to the reader, as they should be. Suffice it to say that they componed.) I proceeded to the ribs, then tried to ignore the shoulder-blades, which were exquisite wings.

His face is rather like the face of your younger brother, if you have one, or maybe your younger sister. Or maybe somebody you will meet tomorrow at a grape festival or a poetry reading.

I marvelled at the back of his knees — a part of the anatomy much overlooked by people and artists. They were the most interesting and sexy back-of-the-knees imaginable. There should be a special word for those two very private places in the body; maybe in some languages there is. A sculptor friend of mine has made up a word that sounds right: knove. Anyway, knoves are not present in the paintings on ancient Greek amphoras, where there is generally a baffling lack of communication between upper and lower arms, thighs and calves, almost as though the ancient figures move in a dimension where knees and elbows do not exist.

But how many ‘dimensions’ has the Hermes? Following the lines from the top down, I came to the conclusion that whereas the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and the neck bone to the shoulder bone, and the shoulder bone to the chest bone, and so on…the astoundingly beautiful muscles and sinews and subtle veins beneath the skin defy description. The statue seems to exist in another, nameless dimension of reality — perhaps in the ‘space/time warp’ or whatever we want to call it, where art reaches out to greet the Infinite. Where beauty exists on its own terms, and is intended to strike the beholder dead, or to force him to re-think what reality is all about, or at the very least — to make him weep.

It was time to leave, and do the arena. We took pictures of each other in front of the pedestal which has been used to light the Olympic flame since the time of the ancient games. Then we charged down the length of the arena, and invisible spectators must have cheered us on to victory, because we both won. We settled down on the grassy slope and amused ourselves by watching the two German tourists who were stripping down to shorts and T-shirts in preparation for their own race. One of their companions sounded the get-set-go, and the two young men bolted away from the starting line. I wondered where they were going. To the other end and back, of course — said my conscious, logical mind. From here to eternity — said another informing intelligence located farther back in my head. They are racing back through time…

‘Here we are,’ I said, leaning back against the cool grass, ‘In the Year of Our Lord 1971, watching some Olympic games right here in Olympia!’

‘After this, we should go to the temple of Zeus,’ said Nikos.

‘But we passed it, didn’t we? All those fallen columns that look like gigantic slices of salami. All those French tourists peering into the dust with magnifying glasses. And what if we bump into those two American dingbats who drove across the Atlantic and got lost less than an hour from Olympia? I’ll tell you what —  let’s go to the house of Phidias, the sculptor who created the giant Zeus, one of the wonders of the ancient world! It was so wonderful that it got stolen, and nobody knows where it ended up…’

‘I’d rather see the temple of Diana; said Nikos.

‘I don’t want to see Diana — I want to see Phidias !’ I cried. ‘Well I want to do Diana!’

‘OK. You do Diana and I’ll do Phidias, and we’ll meet in twenty minutes at Zeus.’

‘All right, as long as you don’t get into a long conversation with the guard, or start collecting hundreds of pine cones, like you did at Sparta.’

‘OK. Entaxi.’

Strolling down the arena, we almost collided with the two German runners who were on their way back to the starting line. It was as though they had moved back in Time, and were now returning to the present. We didn’t wait to find out who won. We left the arena and passed by the temple of Zeus again. How awful to be Lord of the World, I thought, and to have all the columns in your temples fall down. Then we went our separate ways — Nikos for Diana and me for Phidias. I don’t know why I felt quite so strongly about seeing the ruins of the famous sculptor’s house and studio. I felt a little silly about my stubbornness, silly and very, very drowsy. That’s when I leaned against the gate, and slid down to a comfortable sitting position. The air was on fire, and the cicadas went on and on and on…

‘Did Phidias ever sculpt Diana?’ I heard myself asking out loud.

A voice very nearby promptly answered No. I turned around lazily, and saw the guard who was consulting a guidebook, and leaning against an olive tree. He looked like a cross between Jeff Chandler and Jack Palance. (This is because Chandler and Palance appeared in a film called Sign of the Pagan, back in the Fifties.)

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘Know what?’

‘That Phidias never sculpted Diana.’

‘Because it is not written. Not written here,’ he said, showing me the guide-book.

‘Guide-books are not always right,’ I said.

‘So? Neither is the Bible.’

We gazed at the sun, which is not a wise thing to do in Olympia. Eventually, rubbing my eyes, I mentioned that I had a rendezvous shortly at the temple of Zeus.

‘Forget Zeus!’ said the guard. ‘Come with me to Athens. The lights, the people, the cafés!’

‘I’ve just come from Athens. All those tourists jumping into the fountain in Omonia Square. All those washrooms, which must date back to the early Byzantine period, where you stare at a hole in the floor and wonder what to do with it. All those steep streets where you take you life into your hands, especially if you’re wearing slippery sandals. All those gorgeous dark-eyed men who strip you naked with a single glance. All that ice cream!’

‘I like ice cream; said the guard, somewhat defensively.

‘So do I. But right now I want to find out what happened to the famous work of Phidias, the great statue of Zeus, stolen in times of yore and taken to God knows where.’

The guard consulted his guide-book. Trees swayed in the breeze. The fallen columns of the temple of Zeus just lay there. The amorphous interior of the house of Phidias grew more golden and hazy in the afternoon light. I began to wonder what it must have looked like when the great sculptor lived there. It was a smallish place, not much bigger than a bachelor apartment. There must have been many large jars full of olive oil and grain, and wine the colour of sunlight. He might have had concubines, maybe even a wife. Everything was becoming gold. My hands, when I held them up to my eyes, were gold. The face of the guard was gold.

‘How did Phidias sculpt the great statue of Zeus in gold?’ I asked. ‘It was gold, wasn’t it?’

‘Probably. At least partly. Anyway, you don’t sculpt in metal, Miss. You make a model, you make a mould, then you cast in metal.’

‘Oh.’

‘And when is your rendezvous at the temple of Zeus?’ asked the guard.

‘Well…as soon as I’ve finished here,’ I said vaguely.

‘Oh, and when do you think that will be? Do you think you’ll ever be finished here?’ he asked. His black eyes sparkled like pieces of onyx.

I began to realize that something was dreadfully wrong. For one thing, when I tried to get up, my limbs felt as though they were swimming in a sea of honey.

‘Where… where do you think the ancient thieves took the great statue…?’ I asked dreamily.

The guard started to laugh. He laughed and laughed and laughed. ‘Where do you think?’ he said. ‘To that other nameless dimension of reality, of course! How did you put it? That “space/time warp” where art reaches out to greet the Infinite. Where beauty exists on its own terms, and is intended to strike the beholder dead…’

‘…or force him to re-think what reality is all about,’ I murmured. ‘Or at the very least — to make him weep…’ ‘Precisely. And that’s where they took the Zeus.’

‘Do you really think so?’ I asked, managing to look the guard in the eye.

‘I know so,’ he said. Then he leaned back again against the olive trees and listened to the cicadas.

I watched him for a long, long time. He was very beautiful, and he too belonged to another dimension of reality. Praxiteles and Phidias had laboured over just such beauty as this, wrenching it out of the neutral clay of the Now, the Present, and preparing it for its proper place in the eternal order of things. But their beauty had been static; his, I knew, would be defined in motion.

‘Have you spent much time in the arena?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he answered, with an odd sort of crooked smile. ‘I never was an athlete, a runner… but I’ve spent a lot of time there...’

‘You’ve been to a lot of places…’ I said.

‘Yes, I’ve spent a lot of time in a lot of places.’

When he turned to me, his face started to dissolve into pools of light. I noticed the clay on his hands. Now I knew what was happening.

‘I fell asleep,’ I explained when I got back to the temple of Zeus. ‘I wasn’t collecting pine cones or anything. I just fell asleep.’

A familiar red polka-dotted kerchief was bobbing along through the pine trees; the American couple were on their way to the house of Phidias. The German runners, having returned to the starting point, had gotten dressed again and were now doing Diana. The Gypsies were nowhere and everywhere.