Dinner with Persephone Read Online Free PDF Page B

phenomenon here for me is how unmistakably he is not thinking. He is dogmatizing, sure that he knows all that is essential about me. And this very certainty conceals the powerful drive to make me conform to his sure and certain knowledge of me—he is using itlike a policeman’s cosh. He is certain he knows how I am arranged, as if I were an Orthodox church—he has even, in a secular style, I think with bitter amusement, kissed my icon.
    When I arrive at the Mustache’s restaurant in Plaka, on a street with many of the handsome neoclassical buildings that were the architecture of preference for the new Greek state in the 1830s after its Bavarian king arrived bringing his Munich classicism with him, a group of friends and strangers is sitting inside, drinking cold drinks and watching the television over the bar. The choice outdoor tables are given over to tourists, and whenever there is a flurry of activity, one of the Mustache’s friends will hop up behind the bar to fix a tray or carry a plate. If a party speaking a language someone at the table knows well arrives, the Mustache will call out “German, Maria, or Italian, Ari.” But English is most in demand; the largest number of foreign tourists visiting Greece are Britons, some 1.1 million of them every year. After a spate of interpreting and waiting on table, the volunteer returns to the group table with its sips,
mezedes
, and conversation—there is something touching about this arrangement, in which working never arrests friendship. The Mustache hands me the token of the honored guest, the television remote, and a program guide, and tells me to choose any show I want. I channel surf for a moment out of curiosity. There is a trailer for a Greek detective movie—in two separate scenes, different women are slapped so hard they are knocked off their feet. I click forward to the Greek MTV channel. In the pop song video, a man backhands a woman until she finally falls to her knees. Leda shuffles the pages of the program guide and points to a comedy called
The Boss
, whispering to me that our host watches it every day, and signals me to choose it. It turns out to be a sitcom starring Tony Danza, about a household in which a woman earns her living as an executive and a man works as a housekeeper. In America, the show is called
Who’s the Boss?
It is a comedy about equality; in this household, the question is more stable than the answer, which shifts between both, one, the other, and neither.
    “What does the American girl like to eat?” the Mustache asks on one of his runs to the kitchen. He emerges waving a leg of goat, its fluffy tail still attached. “You like goat, Patricia?” he mocks. “Shall we have a
glendi
with goat’s meat?” His wife has just brought it back from her home island, and she and his fifteen-year-old son laugh. At the table, the company consists of his wife and two children, my friend Leda, a professional tour guide, and her fiancé Theo, an architect, and two other men, a businessman and a cartoonist, a
yeliographos.
Greek makes no distinction between painting, drawing, and writing, so that a painter is a
zographos
, a writer of life,
zoi
, and a cartoonist is a writer of laughter. It is hard to imagine this man making drawings to laugh at, using the implements of his sad, exhausted-looking eyes. He finishes his coffee, on his way home to lunch, and wishes me luck. “Greece is beautiful,” he shrugs, “but the Greeks are not good people. I know and you will find out.”
    “Well, Yiorgo,” the businessman diverts him by matching disillusionment to disillusionment, “maybe she will be the only good thing America has ever sent us.” He wears the gold baptismal cross Greek children receive from their godparents when they are christened and a blue glass eye on the same gold chain. The fifteen-year-old boy is obviously worried that I will be shocked by such naked cynicism, and says to me, almost protectively, as if he were telling me to