The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [135]
“You like?” he whispered.
Suddenly, right there and then, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. The decision to become an archaeologist emerged from that singular moment under the streets of Athens. The landscape groaned under the weight of millennia of archaeological levels, but the atmosphere itself was also replete with layers—a heady intersection of both panic and wonder, where gods and mortals cross paths—and nothing could be more intoxicating than being face to face with something so unavoidably ancient.
As a child, I had been haunted by a recurring dream of being pulled into the earth, taken away from everything and everyone I knew and loved, to a place I did not recognize. And now, just like those nightmares, a spectral hand had reached up from the bowels of the earth, wrapped itself around my ankle and yanked me down. Like Persephone, I must have ingested some unseen pomegranate seeds: because it would become my destiny not only to make this place my home—but to learn to see in the dark. I gathered up my best possible answer.
“I like,” I answered, giving his hand a presumptive squeeze. “I like very much.”
I live out the following months in a blur of ancient marble, smoke, cacophony of traffic, people and language. The landscape is nonetheless perfect in a sort of surgical sterility: bone white marbles etched against Kodachrome blue skies, turquoise seas, half moon slices of beach. Not much green anywhere, just the sharp corners of Pythagoras’ geometry living in the rocks, the staccato cypress slicing cliff faces, the hard edge bracing day and night. Yet the landscape speaks to me: I hear its voice in the stadium of ancient Olympia, whistling through the trees surrounding the sanctuary of Asclepius, and in the water lapping at the tip of Attica, reflecting the slender columns of the Temple of Poseidon in a miasmic ripple of sapphire and ivory.
Eventually, winter arrives, and the Athens skyline melts into a flaccid gray smudge, the streets of downtown thick with the aroma of roast chestnuts. The rains come and we wade through the streets of our neighborhood in waist deep water. Over time I return, again and again, to a favorite spot on the Acropolis hill overlooking the Theatre of Dionysus, and as I recline against a marble drum, the rigid flutes penetrating my back, I feel as if I am downloading history. Scanning the city around me—a concrete river cascading from the heights of Lycabettus hill to the glittering shores of the Aegean in the distance—I think of Dionysus and his opposite, Apollo, and realize it’s no coincidence the ancient Greeks worshipped deities representing both the logical and illogical…the atmosphere of this place remains infused with their essence.
One evening, towards the end of our stay, Paki and I are drinking on the rooftop of our apartment. After a couple of farewell toasts, she impulsively launches her glass into the air, and as it flies over the edge of the building, a missile catching the late afternoon sun, I think of Durrell’s suicidal backpacker, phone in hand, placing a call that would never connect. As close to the edge as I have felt myself in the past months, I can’t imagine performing such an erratic act, but still I understand: this place makes you a little crazy. Even though it will soon be time to return to the States and my own life, I know one day I will be back…as much as it frightens me, Greece also is implausibly alluring. Now, more than ever, I want to dig in this earth, to be that conduit, that Persephone, that mistress of the in-between, and search for myself in this landscape.
I listen for the sounds of screaming, terrified that her salvo has killed someone on the street far below. Gratefully, there are no wails, no sirens, just the sounds of seagulls having made their way inland, and the late