Titian Read Free Page B

for him. Rather, I see for him the stone of a peach. Enlarged enormously and flattened. In fact, I see such a stone as the ground of his painting, as a kind of lining to the canvas!
    Yesterday I was looking for the old man to ask him your question about why the light is so honeyed in the painting of Marsyas’ torture. Instead I found a gathering of other old men in Akadimias Street, right in the centre of Athens.
    Thousands of vehicles pass there every hour of the day and night. It’s also the turn-around point of the city’s principal bus lines. It’s always crowded. It’s where I pick up my bus to go to work every day. Bus no. 222. And there, two days ago, some people, waiting to get on their bus, met their deaths.
    The bus – which should have taken them home for their lunch break – went out of control and ploughed into the crowd, laying low eight people before ramming into a barrier and stopping. The victims, who were mostly students, were suffocated, the bus on top of them. Screams, blood, chaos. The police and ambulance couldn’t get through, for there were too many people. One hour later, the radio announced the victims’ names. Everybody cried and crossed themselves. A tragedy. Yet it’s the aftermath I want to tell you about, for it takes us to the heart of Greece.
    When I got off my bus there yesterday (it was a bus no. 222 which caused the deaths), I saw a gathering of three or four hundred people, all men, mostly old-age pensioners – those same men go every morning to the smoky
kafenios
, the cafés for male clients only, to play backgammon, sip their ouzos, and comment on what’s happening in the world – rather than trying to change it. In Akadimias Street, they were waving their arms about and shouting with great excitement.
    At first, I thought it must be a new meeting place for a political debate preceding the elections. But no. What these old men had come to do was to reconstitute the event. Each one had decided when he had awakened yesterday morning to make his way to the scene of the drama and try to see more clearly what had happened.
    â€˜The girl student was there. She wanted to run when she saw the bus coming towards her, but the crowd was too dense – and there was also the bus shelter, which stopped her going in the other direction.’
    â€˜No, you’ve understood nothing! It was the ill-fated old pensioner who must have been standing here, because they said his legs were the first to be broken! Old bones break easily’
    â€˜I tell you, those who died were all further down there. The ones here escaped. Those over there against the barrier, they got it. The others were only wounded, and now they’re in Evangelismos Hospital. They’ll survive – thank God. Think though of the families of those who, for no reason, died yesterday at 12.15, think of them!’
    And so on. A chorus straight out of Aeschylus. Or perhaps, more exactly, the agora, the future Roman forum. The market-place where everybody met to discuss the affairs of the
polis
.
    When tourists enthuse about the living heritage of ancient Greece, it makes me a little sick. It’s too easy, too obvious. And it reminds one painfully of the political nullity intowhich Greek civilisation has fallen. But one thing has survived unquestionably, and that’s the national proclivity for
comment
. To relive happenings, to make a synthesis of them, and to draw conclusions and lessons (which are usually forgotten the next day). Greek philosophy, in its ancient sense and in its contemporary, popular sense, comes exactly from this vision of the Chorus: to tell, to take account of the consequences, to measure the importance.
    Today I passed by Akadimias Street again, I can’t avoid it. A smaller crowd of men was still there, doing the same thing. Meanwhile women had clearly come yesterday afternoon, when the men were taking their siesta, for flowers had been