Read Online Report to Grego by Nikos Kazantzakis - Free Book Online

to mine, then ascend little by little to my knees, belly, breast, and fill me entirely. The delight I experienced was so profound that I thought I would faint. Never in my whole life has a woman given me a more dreadful joy; never have I felt the mystery of the female body’s warmth so profoundly. Even now, seventy years later, I close my eyes and feel Eminé’s warmth rise from my soles and branch out through my entire body, my entire soul.
    Little by little I lost my fear of walking and climbing. Going inside the nearby houses, I played with the children of the neighborhood. The world was growing broader.
    When I was five years old, I was taken to some woman vaguely a teacher to learn how to draw i’s and koulouria on the slate. This was supposed to train my hand so that I would be able to write the letters of the alphabet when I grew older. She was a simple peasant type, short and fattish, a little humpbacked, with a wart on the right side of her chin. Her name was Madam Areté. She guided my hand (her breath smelled of coffee) and expounded on how I should hold the chalk and govern my fingers.
    At first I wanted nothing to do with her. I liked neither her breath nor her hump. But then, though I don’t know how, she began to be transformed little by little before my eyes: the wart disappeared, her back straightened, her flabby body grew slim and beautiful, and finally, after a few weeks, she became a slender angel wearing a snow-white tunic and holding an immense bronze trumpet. I must have seen this angel on some icon in the church of Saint Minas. Once again the eyes of childhood had performed their miracle: angel and Madam Teacher had become one.
    Years went by. I traveled abroad, then returned again to Crete. I called at my teacher’s house. A little old lady was sitting on the doorstep sunning herself. I recognized her by the wart on her chin.When I approached and made myself known to her, she began to weep with joy. I had brought her some presents: coffee, sugar, and a box of loukoums. I hesitated a moment, ashamed to ask her, but the image of the angel with the trumpet had become so firmly established inside me that I could not restrain myself.
    â€œMadam Areté, did you ever wear a white tunic and hold a large bronze trumpet in your hands?”
    â€œSaints preserve us!” the poor old lady cried out, crossing herself. “Me a white jelab, me a trumpet? God forbid! Me a chanteuse!”
    And her eyes began to flow.
    All things were magically re-kneaded in my yeasty childhood mind; they were brought beyond the reasonable and very close to madness. But this madness is the grain of salt which keeps good sense from rotting. I lived, spoke, and moved in a fairy tale which I myself created at every moment, carving out paths in it to allow me to pass. I never saw the same thing twice, because I gave it a new face each time and made it unrecognizable. Thus the world’s virginity renewed itself at every moment.
    Certain fruits, especially, had an inexplicable fascination for me, cherries and figs above all. Not simply the fig itself, the fruit, but the fig leaves and their aroma. I used to close my eyes and smell them, turning pale from dreadful bodily contentment. No, not contentment—agitation, fear, tremor, as though I were entering a dark, dangerous forest.
    One day my mother took me with her and we traveled to a secluded beach outside of Megalo Kastro, a place where women went swimming. My brain filled with a vast boiling sea. Protruding from this fiery indigo were bodies, very pale, weak, and strange, so it seemed to me, as though they were ill. They were emitting shrill cries and hurling armfuls of water at one another. I could see most of them only as far as the waist; from the waist down they were in the sea. Below the waist they must be fish, I decided; they must be the mermaids that people talk about. I remembered the fairy tale my grandmother told me about the mermaid