Mani (10 page)

The thread of life, then, is very brittle. In the remote mountains of Greece, on the bare rocks by day and by the glimmer of rush-lights at night, the skull seems close to the surface and struggling to emerge. One sees it plainly beneath the hollow eye-sockets and cheeks and the jawbone's edge, and in old people, wasted by toil and poverty and fever and worry, it looms—the moment the bright glint of conversation fades to the dark and fatalistic lustre of thought—pathetically close.
[1]
Death is a near neighbour, slight ailments cause exaggerated anxiety among the most robust and more serious illnesses often induce the despair of a wild animal, an inability to fight against death which meets Charon half-way. Invalids often waste away without reason and their eyes reflect neither the impending joys of paradise nor the terrors of hell fire—the temporary rigours of Purgatory and the mists of Limbo have been omitted from Orthodox theology—but extinction, the loss of friends, the end of everything. The bright day is done and they are for the dark, and when the soul flutters away at last no one knows whither it is flying and a shrill and heartrending wail of bereavement goes up.

All over the Greek world—indeed, wherever the religion of Byzantium holds sway—village funerals are accompanied by outward signs of lamentation that come as a great surprise to
those who have only witnessed the prim obsequies of north-western Europe. The mourning is the work of the women. It begins as a lyke-wake, a wailing and keening round the body by candleflame, and when the coffin is carried out into the daylight with the corpse rocking from side to side on the carrying shoulders, the mourning lifts to a crescendo that only fitfully subsides during the funeral service in church, to rise once more on the way to the cemetery, in the wild cries of the kinswomen: “Oh my warrior!
Ah, to pallikari mou!
The arch and pillar of our house! Where are they taking him? Ah, my beautiful flower, my young cypress tree!” This soars to a climax as they reach the grave, the mourner's voice turns to an hysterical screeching howl, she staggers like an intoxicated person, her coif falls off, her hair flies loose and tangled over her face and she scarifies her cheeks with her fingernails till they are criss-crossed with red gashes and running with tears and blood. The supreme moment comes when the coffin is lowered into the shallow grave. Then,—in extreme cases,—uttering shrieks she has to be withheld by force from flinging herself into the grave, a task in which her attendants are not always successful. Dragged to the surface once more, the hysteria seems to subside a little as the earth is thrown in, but all the way home, shaken with sobs and outbursts of wailing at widening intervals, she is supported and surrounded by a black-clad throng of women who guide her staggering along the lanes. For days afterwards during visits of condolence the same symptoms occur in a milder form. The gravity of mourning loses ground before a sudden rush of talk: he was the best of sons, a real warrior, such a good boy, kind to his mother and father, so full of life, the best shot in the village, he played the
lyra
so swiftly you couldn't see the bow, he leapt higher than any of them at the dance, and flew like a bird! What's the use of making sons with such pain and sorrow if Charon steals them from us? Tears are soon flowing fast. The mourner's face breaks and her voice sails up in the thin ritual
trance-like wail of the
miroloy
. She is at once surrounded, embraced and gently scolded by her family who manage to quieten her bit by bit. In a few weeks' time this dwindles and disappears. Gradually, backed by a host of comforting adages, the consolations of fatalism assert themselves. The deep sighs and the black clothes continue for life.

After the first reactions of awe and horror, the sight of the general ritual of misery is desperately moving and sad. The fact that custom has evolved a formal framework for grief takes nothing away from its authenticity or from the sting of pity it evokes. There was a deep wisdom behind the orgiastic and hysterical aspects of ancient religion; there is much to be said in favour of this flinging open of the floodgates to grief. It might be argued that the decorous little services of the West, the hushed voices, the self-control, our brave smiles and calmness either stifle the emotion of sorrow completely, or drive it underground where it lodges and proliferates in a malign and dangerous growth that festers for a lifetime.

In these eastern funerals, it goes without saying that emotional and histrionically gifted women react in a more spectacular fashion than the rest. Tongues are sometimes clicked when funerals are discussed if a performance has been too obviously stagey, too shameless an exploitation of opportunity. Nearly everything in Greece has its balancing corrective. “Poor old Sophia was piling it on a bit,” one sometimes hears people say, “I couldn't look at her....” The men of the family often appear uncomfortable while all this goes on; changing feet, turning their caps nervously round and round in their fingers, keeping their eyes glued to the ground with all the symptoms of male embarrassment at a purely feminine occasion. “May God pardon all his sins,” the men say, “May his memory be eternal,” and “Let the earth rest upon him lightly;” and no more. For death and burial are one of the few occasions in Greek peasant life when women come into their own and take over. After long
years of drudgery and silence and being told to shut up they are suddenly on top and there is no doubt that for some of them, famous
miroloyistrias
, wailers with a turn for acting and a gift of improvisation, these are moments secretly longed for. They will undertake immense journeys to bewail a distant kinsman, or even, in extreme cases, people they have never met. Some of them are in great demand. “When I told old Phroso that Panayoti was dead and buried,” I once heard somebody observe with a wry smile, “she didn't say, ‘May God pardon all his sins,' but ‘What a shame I missed being there to wail for him.... Who did the
miroloy
? Old Kyriakoula? Po! po! po! She doesn't even know how to start....'”

But the dirges of the Mani are a very different matter from these unco-ordinated cries. They are entire poems, long funeral hymns with a strict discipline of metre. Stranger still, the metre exists nowhere else in Greece. The universal fifteen-syllable line of all popular Greek poetry is replaced here by a line of sixteen syllables, and the extra foot entirely changes the sound and character of the verse.

 

 

goes the ordinary Greek decapentesyllabic rhyming couplet. The sixteen-syllable line of a Maniot dirge goes like this:

 

 

They are sung extempore by the graveside, and it seems that the Maniot women, like the unlettered mountaineers in Crete in the invention of
mantinades
,
[3]
have this extraordinary knack of improvisation. There are, of course, certain conventional phrases that recur (like the epithets and the unchanging formulae that cement the
Odyssey
) which give time for planning the next two lines. But anyone who has heard the speed with which the Cretans can turn any incident on the spot into a faultless rhyming couplet and each time with an epigrammatic sting in the second line (here again the slow embroidered repetition of the first line by the company gives the singer a few seconds for thought), will not find this hard to believe. The similarity of these
miroloyia
with the themes of ancient Greek literature, most notably with the lament of Andromache over the body of Hector, coupled with the fact that this region remained pagan till six entire centuries after Constantine had made Christianity the official Greek religion, and with the fact that they only exist in the Mani, tempts one to think that here again is a direct descendant of Ancient Greece, a custom stretching back, perhaps, till before the Siege of Troy.

On the alert for dirges ever since arriving in the Mani, I had managed to collect a number of broken fragments people had remembered from past funerals, but nothing complete. It was rather a delicate thing and I felt ashamed to admit that I was hanging about like a vulture waiting for someone—anyone—to die and be buried and mourned over. I never saw a funeral there but I managed to find out a certain amount about how the dirges are sung. The chief woman mourner stands at the coffin's head and begins the
klama
, or weeping. It is her duty to welcome all the guests in the order of their importance, and, if
possible, with a compliment for each and a word of thanks for their attendance. Then comes the
miroloy
proper, and it unfolds, in spite of the semi-ecstatic mode of delivery, in a logical sequence of proem, exegesis and epilogue. As the dirge continues, the knees stiffen, the hair falls in disorder, the headkerchief is stretched across the shoulders, an end held in each hand, which work up and down with a sawing motion in time to the slow beat of the metre. The breast is struck, the cheeks clawed, and very often the
miroloy
accelerates into a gabble and finally into wails and shrieks without meaning. If the dead man has been killed in a feud the dirge may finish with terrible curses and oaths of vengeance: the dirge-singer often tears her hair out in dishevelled handfuls and flings it in the open coffin; just, in fact, as Achilles and the Myrmidons cast their severed tresses on the bier of Patroclus. When she fades out, another woman “takes” the
klama
; she begins with consoling words for the bereaved, continuing with compliments to the guests and an encomium of the dead. She in her turn dies down, another “takes,” and so the
klama
goes on. In the wailing over Hector, Andromache was succeeded by Hecuba and Hecuba by Helen. If the dead has left unprotected children, they are brought into the dirge like the fatherless Astyanax: who will look after them now? The tools of his profession are rhetorically invoked. If he were a shepherd, how will the ewes and the rams console themselves, what will become of his crook and his water-bottle? All, animate and inanimate, are shedding tears now for their lost master; if a mason, his bricks, mortar and trowel; if a soldier, his rifle and bayonet; a schoolmaster, his blackboard and chalk; a lawyer, his brief-case and rostrum and documents and red tape. At home, meanwhile, everything—tables and chairs, loom, handmill, olive press, saddles, the stones of the walls,
the leaves of the olive trees, and the thorns of the prickly pear are all weeping together. What will become of them? Their sun and their moon have been taken away, the very breeze that ruffled the leaves. He was a lion, an eagle, but gentle as a lamb to his loved ones; but now he is in the dark world of shadows among his vanished kinsmen and ancestors, the dead warriors, the great-souled heroes of the Mani.... But it is not always an encomium. His faults are mentioned, and his deeds are assessed. Once, when an elderly village idiot with no relations was being buried, the women refused to sing a lament until at last, egged on by men who were shocked at this impiety, an old woman piped up: “Ah, poor John, how you stank when you were alive! Why is it you don't stink now you are dead?...” Sometimes, in the inspired half-trance of the
miroloy
, the singer goes clean off the rails, drifting into personal reminiscence and old grievances, even into questions of politics, where, without any relevance, problems of taxation and economy, the fall of governments, the names of ministers and generals, the price of salt, the Bulgarian frontier, the need for roads or a new mole for the caiques to unload their flour—all in faultless sixteen-syllable couplets—weave themselves into the song, until the next mourner tactfully steers the
klama
back to its proper theme.

The singers are unable, except for a few disjointed fragments, to remember what they have sung. If the dirge has been in any way remarkable, it is pieced together afterwards by the bystanders. In this way many have passed into general circulation and women intone them for generations afterwards as they spin and weave and press the olives. Collections of
miroloyia
, many of them of high poetical value, have been made and new ones are constantly emerging.

I despaired of ever hearing a
miroloy
. But on our last day in Areopolis, drinking at a little tavern that sold excellent wine brought from Megara by the barrel, I fell into conversation with a flaxen-haired young man called George Chryssikakis. The talk was soon steered in the direction of my obsession. What, never heard a dirge? He would take me to see his cousin
Eleni; she was one of the best
miroloyistrias
in the Deep Mani. He picked us up in the early evening and led us through a maze of lanes to a small white house on the edge of the precipice which sank to the Messenian Gulf. Here, surrounded by flowering herbs in whitewashed petrol-tins, his old aunt and his cousin Eleni were knitting under a pomegranate tree. His cousin was a handsome, plump young woman with apple cheeks and bright disarming eyes, quite unlike the sombre crone I had expected. Coffee and spoonfuls of jam were soon produced, and when we were settled under the russet bombs that grew on the branches, George made her recite half a dozen
miroloya
, all very beautiful. But nothing, at first, would make her sing. She laughed self-consciously, and said that singing a dirge without a death was like trying to get
kefi
[4]
without drinking wine. “No, go on, Eleni,” George insisted. “I promised them. Sing them the one about the English airman. They'll like that.”

“The English airman?”

“Yes, the poor fellow who was shot down at Limeni—just over there—during the war. We gave him a fine funeral and Eleni sang the
miroloy
: we were all very sorry for him.”

She gave a resigned sigh, laid the sock she was knitting in her lap and folded her arms. After collecting herself for a few seconds she began slowly singing in a high thin voice. It was a strange, unseizable tune in a minor key and unspeakably sad and beautiful. Whether it was the music or the words, I soon felt a tightening of the throat and pricking behind the eyes and that odd crawling sensation of the nape and scalp that writers must mean when they talk of the hair standing on end. When she finished, her eyes were full of tears. I begged her to sing it again. I transcribe it here, translated word for word, so that nothing should be lost in the attempt to put it into verse: