Zorba the Greek, Page 3

  "But at the time, you see, my blood was hot in my veins! How could I stop to examine the whys and wherefores? To think things out properly and fairly, a fellow's got to be calm and old and toothless: When you're an old gaffer with no teeth, it's easy to say: 'Damn it, boys, you mustn't bite!' But, when you've got all thirty-two teeth ... A man's a savage beast when he's young; yes, boss, a savage, man-eating beast!"

  He shook his head.

  "Oh, he eats sheep, too, and hens and pigs, but if he doesn't eat men his belly's not satisfied."

  He added as he crushed out his cigarette in the coffee saucer:

  "No, his belly's not satisfied. Now, what does the old owl have to say to that, eh?"

  He did not wait for an answer.

  "What can you say, I wonder?" he continued, weighing me up. "As far as I can see, your lordship's never been hungry, never killed, never stolen, never committed adultery. What ever can you know of the world? You've got an innocent's brain and your skin's never even felt the sun," he muttered with obvious scorn.

  I became ashamed of my delicate hands, my pale face and my life which had not been bespattered with mud and blood.

  "All right!" said Zorba, sweeping his heavy hand across the table as if wiping a sponge across it. "All right! There's one thing, though, I'd like to ask you. You must've gone through hundreds of books, perhaps you know the answer ..."

  "Go ahead, Zorba, what is it?"

  "There's a sort of miracle happening here, boss. A funny sort of miracle which puzzles me. All that business—those lousy tricks, thefts and that slaughter of ours—I mean of us rebels—all that brought Prince George to Crete. Liberty!"

  He looked at me with his eyes wide open in amazement.

  "It's a mystery," he murmured, "a great mystery! So, if we want liberty in this bad world, we've got to have all those murders, all those lousy tricks, have we? I tell you, if I began to go over all the bloody villainy and all the murders we did, you'd have your hair stand on end. And yet, the result of all that, what's it been? Liberty! Instead of wiping us out with a thunderbolt, God gives us liberty! I just don't understand!"

  He looked at me, as if calling for help. I could see that this problem had tormented him a lot and that he could not get to the bottom of it.

  "Do you understand?" he asked me with anguish.

  Understand what? Tell him what? Either that what we call God does not exist, or else that what we call murders and villainy is necessary for the struggle and for the liberation of the world ...

  I tried hard to find for Zorba another, simpler way of explaining it.

  "How does a plant sprout and grow into a flower on manure and muck? Say to yourself, Zorba, that the manure and muck is man and the flower liberty."

  "But the seed?" cried Zorba, striking his fist on the table. "For a plant to sprout there must be a seed. Who's put such a seed in our entrails? Änd why doesn't this seed produce flowers from kindness and honesty? Why must it have blood and filth?"

  I shook my head.

  "I don't know," I said.

  "Who does?"

  "No one."

  "But then," Zorba cried in despair and casting wild glances about him, "what d'you expect me to do with all your boats, and your machines and neckties?"

  Two or three passengers whom the sea had upset, and who were now drinking coffee at a nearby table, revived. They sensed a quarrel and pricked up their ears.

  This disgusted Zorba. He lowered his voice.

  "Change the subject," he said. "When I think of that, I feel like breaking anything within reach—a chair, a lamp, or my head against the wall. But what good would that do me? I'd have to pay the breakages and go to a doctor and have my head bandaged. And if God exists, well, it's far worse: we're bloody well done for! He must be peering at me from up there in the sky and bursting his sides with laughter."

  He suddenly made a movement with his hand as if getting rid of an importunate fly.

  "Never mind!" he said regretfully. "All I wanted to tell you was this: When the royal ship arrived all decked up with flags, and they began to fire off rounds from the guns, and the prince set foot on Cretan soil ... Have you ever seen a whole people gone mad because they've seen their liberty? No? Ah, boss, then blind you were born and blind you'll die. If I live a thousand years, even if all that remains of me is a morsel of living flesh, what I saw that day I'll never forget! And if each of us could choose his paradise in the sky, according to his taste—and that's how it should be, that's what I call paradise—I'd say to the Almighty: 'Lord, let my paradise be a Crete decked with myrtle and flags and let the minute when Prince George set foot on Cretan soil last for centuries!' That'll do me."

  Zorba became silent once more. He raised his moustache, filled a glass to the brim with iced water and swallowed it in one gulp.

  "What happened in Crete, Zorba? Tell me!"

  "Do we have to start making big sentences?" said Zorba, annoyed. "Look here, I tell you, I do—this world is a mystery and man is just a great brute.

  "A great brute and a god. A blackguard of a rebel who'd come from Macedonia with me—Yorga, they called him, a gallows' bird, a real swine, you know—well, he wept. 'Why're you crying, Yorga, you hound?' I said, and my eyes were streaming too. 'Why're you crying, you old swine?' But he just threw his arms round my neck and blubbered like a kid. And then that miserly bastard pulls out his purse, empties onto his lap the gold coins he'd looted from the Turks and throws them into the air by handfuls! D'you see, boss, that's what liberty is!"

  I rose and went up on deck, to be buffeted by the keen sea breeze.

  That's what liberty is, I thought. To have a passion, to amass pieces of gold and suddenly to conquer one's passion and throw the treasure to the four winds.

  Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model the longer the tether of our slavery? Then we can enjoy ourselves and frolic in a more spacious arena and die without having come to the end of the tether. Is that, then, what we call liberty?

  Towards the end of the afternoon we berthed by the sandy shore and saw finely sifted white sand, oleanders still in flower, fig and carob trees, and, further to the right, a low grey hill without a tree, resembling the face of a woman resting. And beneath her chin, along her neck, ran the dark brown veins of lignite.

  An autumnal wind was blowing, frayed clouds were passing slowly over the earth and softening its contours with shadow. Other clouds were rising menacingly in the sky. The sun appeared and disappeared, and the earth's surface was brightened and darkened like a living and perturbed face.

  I stopped for a moment on the sand and looked. A sacred solitude lay before me, deadly and yet fascinating, like the desert. The Buddhist song rose out of the very soil and found its way to the depths of my being. "When shall I at last retire into solitude, alone, without companions, without joy and without sorrow, with only the sacred certainty that all is a dream? When, in my rags—without desires—shall I retire contented into the mountains? When, seeing that my body is merely sickness and crime, age and death, shall I—free, fearless and blissful—retire into the forest? When? When, oh when?"

  Zorba, with his santuri beneath his arm, his steps still unsteady, came towards me.

  "There's the lignite!" I said, to hide my emotions. And I stretched my arm towards the hill with the woman-like face.

  Zorba frowned without looking round.

  "Later. This isn't the time, boss," he said. "Must wait for the earth to stop. She's still pitching, the devil take her, like the deck of a ship. Let's go to the village."

  With these words he set off with long, determined strides, trying to save his face.

  Two barefooted urchins, as brown as Arabs, ran up and took charge of the luggage. A huge customs officer was smoking a hookah in the customs shed. He scrutinized us from out of the corner of hís blue eyes, took a nonchalant g
lance at the bags, and shifted momentarily on his seat as if he were going to get up. But it was too much of an effort. He slowly raised the hookah tube and said in a sleepy voice: "Welcome!"

  One of the urchins came up to me. He winked with his oliveblack eyes and said in a mocking tone:

  "He's no Cretan. He's a lazy devil."

  "Aren't Cretans lazy devils, too?"

  "They are ... yes, they are," the young Cretan replied, "but in a different way."

  "Is the village far?"

  "Only a gun-shot from here. Look, behind the gardens, in the ravine. A fine village, sir. Plenty of everything—carob trees, beans, grain, oil, wine. And down there in the sand, the earliest cucumbers, tomatoes, aubergines and watermelons in Crete. It's the winds from Africa makes them swell. At night, in the orchard, you can hear them crackling and getting bigger."

  Zorba was going on in front. His head was still swimming. He spat.

  "Chin up, Zorba!" I called to him. "We've scraped through all right. There's nothing more to fear!"

  We walked quickly. The earth was mixed with sand and shells, and here and there grew a tamarisk, a wild fig tree, a tuft of reeds, some bitter mullein. The weather was sultry, the clouds were gathering lower and lower, the wind was dropping.

  We were passing by a great fig tree with a twisted double trunk which was beginning to grow hollow with age. One of the urchins stopped and with a jerk of the chin pointed to the old tree.

  "The Fig Tree of Our Young Lady!" he said.

  I started. On this Cretan soil, every stone, every tree has its tragic history.

  "Of Our Young Lady? Why that name?"

  "In my grandfather's time, the daugbter of one of our landowners fell in love with a shepherd boy. But her father wouldn't hear of it. The young lady wept, screamed and pleaded. The old man never changed his tune! One night the young couple disappeared. The countryside was searched, but for one, two, three days, a whole week, they weren't to be found. Then they began to stink, so the stench was followed and they were found rotting beneath this fig tree, locked in each other's arms. You see, they found them through the stench."

  The child burst out laughing. The sounds of the village could be heard. Dogs began to bark, women to talk shrilly, cocks to announce the change in the weather. In the air floated the odor of grapes which came from the vats where raki was being distilled.

  "There's the village!" shouted the two boys, and rushed off.

  As soon as we had rounded the sandy hill the little village came into sight. It seemed to be clambering up the side of the ravine. Whitewashed, terraced houses huddled together. Their open windows made dark patches, and they resembled whitened skulls jammed between the rocks.

  I caught up with Zorba.

  "Mind you behave, now we're entering the village," I told him. "They mustn't get wind of us, Zorba. We'll act like serious businessmen. I'm the manager and you're the foreman. Cretans don't take things lightly. As soon as they've set eyes on you, they pick on anything queer, and give you a nickname. After that, you can't get rid of it. You run about like a dog with a saucepan tied to its tail."

  Zorba seized his moustache in his fist and plunged into meditation. Finally he said:

  "Listen, boss, if there's a widow in the place, you've no need to fear. If there isn't ..."

  Just then, as we entered the village, a beggar-woman clothed in rags rushed towards us with outstretched hand. She was swarthy, filthy, and had a stiff little black moustache.

  "Hi, brother!" she called familiarly to Zorba. "Hi, brother, got a soul, have you?"

  Zorba stopped.

  "I have," he replied gravely.

  "Then give me five drachmas!"

  Zorba pulled out of his pocket a dilapidated leather purse.

  "There," he said, and his lips, which still had a bitter expression, softened into a smile. He looked round and said:

  "Looks as if souls are cheap in these parts, boss! Five drachmas a soul!"

  The village dogs bounded towards us, the women leaned over the terraces to gaze at us, the children followed us, yelling. Some of them yelped, others made sounds like Klaxons, still others ran in front of us and looked at us with their big eyes full of amazement.

  We arrived at the village square, where we found two huge white poplars surrounded by crudely carved trunks which served as seats. Opposite was the café, over which hung an enormous, faded sign: The Modesty Café-and-Butcher's-Shop.

  "Why are you laughing?" Zorba asked.

  But I did not have time to reply. From the door of the café and butcher's shop ran óut five or six giants wearing dark-blue breeches with red waistbands. They shouted: "Welcome, friends! Come in and have a raki. It's still warm from the vat."

  Zorba clicked his tongue and said: "What about it, boss?" He turned round and winked at me. "Shall we have one?"

  We drank a glass and it burned our insides. The proprietor of the café-butchery, who was a brisk, tough, well-preserved old man, brought out chairs for us.

  I asked where we might lodge.

  "Go to Madame Hortense's," someone shouted.

  "A Frenchwoman here!" I exclaimed in surprise.

  "From the devil knows where; she's been all over the place. She's managed to avoid going on all the rocks you can think of, and now she's clung on to the last one here and has opened an inn."

  "She sells sweets, too!" cried a child.

  "She powders and paints herself up," someone else said. "She puts a ribbon round her neck… And she's got a parrot."

  "A widow?" Zorba asked. "Is she a widow?"

  The café proprietor seized his thick grey beard.

  "How many whiskers can you count here, friend? How many? Well, she's widow of as many husbands. Get the idea?"

  "Got it," Zorba replied, licking his lips.

  "She might make you a widower, too!"

  "Mind your step, friend!" shouted an old man, and all burst out laughing.

  We were treated to a new round and the café proprietor brought it to us on a tray, together with barley loaf, goat cheese and pears.

  "Now leave these people alone. They mustn't dream of going to madame's! They're going to spend the night right here!"

  "I'm going to have them, Kondomanolio!" said the old man. "I've got no children. My house is big and there's plenty of room."

  "Sorry, uncle Anagnosti," the café proprietor shouted in the old man's ear. "I spoke first."

  "You take one," said old Anagnosti; "I'll take t'other, the old 'un."

  "Which old 'un?" said Zorba, stung to the quick. "We'll stick together," I said, and made a sign to Zorba not to get annoyed. "We'll stick together and we'll go to Madame Hortense's…"

  "Welcome! Welcome to you!"

  A dumpy, plump little woman, with bleached flax-colored hair, appeared beneath the poplars, waddling along on her bandy legs. A beauty spot, from which sprang sow-bristles, adorned her chin. She was wearing a red-velvet ribbon round her neck, and her withered cheeks were plastered with mauve powder. A gay little lock of hair danced on her brow and made her look somewhat like Sarah Bernhardt in her old age playing L'Aiglon.

  "Delighted to meet you, Madame Hortense!" I replied, preparing to kiss her hand, carried away as I was by a sudden good humor.

  Life appeared all at once like a fairy-tale or the opening scene of The Tempest. We had just set foot on the island, soaked to the skín after an imaginary shipwreck. We were exploring the marvellous coasts, and ceremoniously greeting the inhabitants of the place. This woman, Hortense, seemed to me to be the queen of the island, a sort of blonde and glistening walrus who had been cast up, half-rotting, on this sandy shore. Behind her appeared the numerous dirty, hairy faces radiating the general good humor of the people—or of Caliban—who gazed at the queen with pride and scorn.

  Zorba, the prince in disguise, also stared at her, as if she were an old comrade, an old frigate who had fought on distant seas, who had known victory and defeat, her hatches battered in, her masts broken, her sails to
rn—and who now, scored with furrows which she had caulked with powder and cream, had retired to this coast and was waiting. Surely she was waiting for Zorba, the captain of the thousand scars. And I was delighted to see these two actors meet at last in a Cretan setting which had been very simply produced and painted in a few broad strokes of the brush.

  "Two beds, Madame Hortense," I said, bowing before this old specialist in the art of acting love scenes. "Two beds, and no bugs."

  "No bugs! I should think not!" she cried, throwing me a provocative glance.

  "Oh, no!" shouted the mocking mouths of Caliban.

  "There aren't! There aren't!" she retorted, stamping on the stones with her plump foot. She was wearing thick sky-blue stockings and a pair of battered court-shoes with dainty silk bows.

  "Off with you, prima donna! The devil take you!" Caliban roared once more.

  But, with great dignity, Dame Hortense was already going and opening up the way for us. She smelt of powder and cheap soap.

  Zorba followed her, devouring her with his eyes.

  "Take an eyeful of that, boss," he confided. "The way the trollop swings her hips, plaf! plaf! like an ewe with a tailful of fat!"

  Two or three big drops of rain fell, the sky clouded over. Blue lightning flickered over the mountain. Young girls, wrapped in their little white goat-skin capes, were hurriedly bringing back from pasture the family goats and sheep. The women, squatting in front of their hearths, were kindling the evening fire.

  Zorba bit his moustache impatiently, without taking his eyes off the rolling buttocks of the woman.

  "Hm!" he suddenly muttered with a sigh. "To hell with life! The jade's never done playing us tricks!"

  3

  Dame Hortense's hotel consisted of a row of old bathing-huts joined together. The first was the shop where you could buy sweets, cigarettes, peanuts, lamp-wicks, alphabets, candles and benjamin. Four adjoining huts formed the dormitory. Behind, in the yard, were the kitchen, the washhouse, the henhouse and the rabbit hutches. Thick bamboos and prickly pears were planted in the fine sand all round. The whole place smelled of the sea, excrement and urine. But, from time to time, Dame Hortense passed by and the air changed its odor—as if someone had emptied a hairdresser's bowl under your nose.