From Steam to the Horizon

 

From Steam to the Horizon

Body, Memory, and the Future Tense of Narrative in Antonis Nikolis’s Novella Daniel Goes to the Sea

Introduction: Memory, Narrative, and Return

The ship drops anchor at daybreak, and Michalis, after an absence of almost thirty years, looks from the deck toward the island of his adolescence. The contours of the landscape elude him, the town seems more densely built, the slopes of Mount Dikaios are more guessed at than seen, while a few fixed landmarks—the battlements of the Knights’ castle, the breakwater of the old harbour—persist as certainties in a place that has shifted with time. This first image already contains, in miniature, the entire novella. The man who returns will search for a place and for a self preserved within him with the same uncertain clarity, and the characteristic phrase “I could more readily guess at them than see them” soon exceeds the description of a dawn arrival to foreshadow a narrative in which sight continually encounters conjecture, the material trace encounters mnemonic reconstruction, and the event encounters the image it continues to generate decades later.

The ostensible reason for the journey has all the prosaic ordinariness of mature life: an undivided share in a plot of land, a notarial deed, an impending sale, the money due to Michalis. The returning man is approaching fifty. He has a family, a career, two sons, a holiday home, travels, a life that has acquired its own geography and its own order. Beneath this settled biography, however, another need is stirring, one about which he initially speaks evasively, since he wants to “untangle a few frayed threads of memory” from his adolescence. The image is exact. Memory appears as worn fabric whose original coherence has been lost, yet enough threads remain to lead the person who touches them back toward the old weave.

The first movement toward that earlier age has, in fact, begun before the journey itself. His second son, Iordanis, has turned eighteen, and his children’s adolescence has filled the house with sweat, trainers, clothes strewn about, with that excess of youthful energy the narrator characteristically describes, in self-mocking terms, as “testosterone clumsily splashed everywhere.” The mature man rediscovers his own adolescence through the material presence of his sons’ adolescence. Before memory assumes the form of thought, it returns as smell.

The same process begins as soon as Michalis reaches the hotel. The scent of cypress cones and pine needles, dampened by the night’s humidity, rises into his nostrils and follows him into his room. Later, a familiar footfall will bring Tasos back to him. The touch of a dusty sole, the metallic clatter of a tin jug, the smell and humidity of the hammam will successively open passageways into the earlier time. The senses function as the true temporal gateways of the novella. Where a more conventional narrative might require a date or an explicit announcement of retrospection, for Nikolis a smell, a texture, a sound, an almost imperceptible change in breathing is enough. The body remembers before the mind has organised what it remembers.

This bodily operation of memory is organically connected with Michalis’s narrative position, for he is at once the man who narrates and the adolescent who lived what he narrates. Between the two lie three decades, an entire adult life, and a curious reversal of knowledge. The present-day Michalis understands more than the seventeen-year-old did and remembers less. He possesses the language he lacked then and has lost the precision of immediate experience. This double position gives the first-person narrative its particular depth, since the adolescent gaze and mature interpretation coexist within the same voice. The narrator corrects himself, introduces qualifications, retrospectively recognises meanings that the adolescent could only intuit, so that the narrative often seems to think at the very moment it unfolds.

This peculiarity becomes almost a form of self-commentary when Michalis reaches the Saturdays at the hammam. He hesitates over their exact number and eventually settles on a definite version, having already explained to the reader that he is ascribing to an old experience the precision of something recently lived. A little later, he admits that the images return confused, partial, fragmentary, that the “weft gets tangled,” and that their sequence requires composition. Memory supplies the material and narrative assumes responsibility for its ordering. Uncertainty thus becomes a constitutive element of narrative truth, as Michalis exposes the limits of his access to the past and constructs his voice upon an awareness of precisely those limits.

This is why the smallest details acquire such power. Memory loses sequence and preserves a smell, lets a face fade while retaining a mark on the skin, allows a conversation to dissolve while saving the sound of wooden clogs. Its truth lies in the remarkable endurance of certain traces, and narrative time follows the same principle, since three decades can fit within a few paragraphs while a single afternoon in the final year of secondary school extends across entire pages. Biography measures years, memory measures densities, and where experience was dense, narrative slows down, returns to detail, circles around a gesture, and allows a vanished body to recover volume.

The Island as Palimpsest, the Hammam as Archive

Space functions in a comparable way. The island appears both as a real topography and as a palimpsest of historical times. The Knights’ castle, the ancient agora, the mosque, the remains of the Roman aqueduct, new houses built in former orchards, once-rural stretches turned into suburbs all coexist along the same route. An open lot has become an archaeological site, a field has become a building plot, a childhood road has been absorbed into a more densely built town, and the island’s topography begins to function exactly like the narrator’s memory, with every present surface bearing beneath it an earlier use and every middle-aged body retaining the trace of what it once was.

Michalis’s meeting with Tasos and Giorgos consequently acquires a particular weight. The narrator observes their present bodies almost as an archivist might, comparing hair, weight, wrinkles, posture, and gait with the adolescent “figures” he has preserved within himself. The spare admission, “We have grown old, that much is certain,” removes any temptation toward melodrama and leaves the essential fact exposed: time has become body. The first allusion to the hammam also reveals that the three friends now approach their memory in much the same way as they once approached the place itself, with curiosity, reserve, and awkward retreat, while their old shared experience surfaces through their mature evasions as something that continues to bind them precisely because it remained unspoken for decades.

Even before this encounter, Michalis’s own body has already led him toward the orchards. His feet quicken or slow of their own accord, his pulse accelerates, his breathing requires conscious regulation, as though physiology knew the destination before thought had consented to acknowledge it. When Michalis reaches the old courtyard gate, he confronts something close to the material form of his own memory. The buildings have collapsed, the plaster has fallen away, doors and windows have disappeared, plants have taken root in the joints, the domes of the hammam are hidden behind weeds, caper bushes, and wild fig trees. Yet amid this general decay the palm tree survives, and above all the male cypress beside the entrance to the bathhouse, the old “giant guardian of the boys’ nakedness.” With the tree, Daniel’s voice also returns, along with his prediction that, when everyone else has gone, the cypress “will live and reign.” The tree measures the difference between human time and the time of place, persisting where people, uses, and buildings have receded.

Before the ruins, images begin to return “like pieces of torn postcards”: half a conversation, teeth and lips without an entire face, hairs at the tip of a nose, aged fingers, a hairy back, Daniel in his heavy wooden clogs, Marigo wiping sweat from her forehead, until everything dissolves “like the steam from the bath.” Here lies one of the novella’s most beautiful formal inventions. The hammam is simultaneously an object of memory and an image of the way memory itself operates. Steam makes bodies present while rendering their contours uncertain. It permits intimacy and blurs vision, just as adolescence returns to Michalis, vivid as sensation and elliptical as representation.

The nightmare that follows transfers this instability into the body itself. Michalis bends over Daniel’s well, his shoes fall bloodied into the darkness, and when he turns his gaze upon himself, he finds his head each time attached to a different body. This fearful dissolution will later find its inverse in the morning after the great night, when the adolescent feels as though his body had been taken apart by craftsmen and technicians and assembled anew. Between these two images lies the passage from uncertainty toward a new way of inhabiting the body.

When Michalis finally passes through the courtyard gate, his movement through the ruins resembles an excavation. He touches old objects, climbs crumbling stairs, picks up a forgotten man’s shoe, feels the dust against his palm, hears a tin jug strike the dry trunk of the mulberry tree. A calendar remains on the wall, stopped at 19 August 1981. The house has become an uncatalogued archive in which things survive severed from the lives and uses that once connected them. Something similar is true of the past within the narrator, where it survives as a collection of remains awaiting a new articulation, except that here the excavator is himself part of the find.

Of all the buildings, the hammam has survived best. The detail almost seems to comment upon the workings of memory itself, since the site of the most intense experience proves also to be the most resistant to decay. Michalis enters “with his knees giving way,” recognises the cashier’s desk, the lockers, the taps, the chambers, the skylights, the kourasani mortar, and breathes in the dust and damp air until “everything came back vividly alive,” together with the warmth and humid gleam of flesh. The ruin becomes body again.

Initiation and the Figure of Daniel

From this point begins the novella’s other great movement, the return to initiation. The three adolescents had first approached the hammam in an atmosphere of rumour, curiosity, and fear. The place belonged to an indistinct zone within the small community, familiar and yet surrounded by whispers. The boys knew enough to expect something and too little to know precisely what they were expecting. Their initiation has already begun with their entry, with nakedness, the wooden clogs, the bodies around them, the changes in temperature and hearing. With every subsequent visit, their step becomes more assured and the clogs sound louder. The body learns the space and the space inscribes itself upon the body.

At its centre stands Daniel, a figure constructed above all through small, persistent details: tall and lean, dark, austere, “a man from another age in his gestures and expression,” dressed in clean clothes, sparing with words, speaking in the distinctive rhythm of the local dialect, his pocketknife paring a sliver of wood into a toothpick. The power of his presence derives precisely from this materiality. The narrator gradually invests him with initiatory authority while continually keeping visible the human body that bears it.

His position within the community is equally ambiguous. Daniel converses with priests and tradesmen and moves within the social fabric, while around his name there forms a zone of reservations, half-spoken remarks, and concealed grimaces. In retrospect, the mature Michalis reads this atmosphere as a mixture of respect and awe. Daniel stands within the community and at the same time slightly outside its more conventional codes, precisely in the position from which he can become the bearer of a different kind of knowledge about the body and desire.

That knowledge is condensed into the sentence that will accompany Michalis throughout his life. “Whoever lacks the courage of his feelings remains crippled. One day you must understand that,” Daniel tells him, and the mature narrator still lowers his head when recalling the words, admitting that the full meaning of this “courage of one’s feelings” remains open to him even now. The phrase acquires the force of an elemental ethics of desire, in which feeling demands recognition and recognition requires courage, while the lesson continues far beyond the moment in which it was uttered, since the adolescent hears it and the mature man, thirty years later, is still learning what it means.

Seen in this light, the “children’s night” acquires a significance far broader than that of a story of sexual awakening. The experience concerns desire and, at the same time, nakedness, embarrassment, different bodies, age, tenderness, care, the asymmetries between older and younger participants, play, and silence, so that initiation unfolds within a dense web of sensations and relations. Daniel is the central figure in this world, endowed with the authority of the host, the power of the elder, the knowledge of someone who has seen more bodies and heard more stories, and at the same time with his own human participation in the desire circulating through the space.

At the same time, the narrative keeps him rooted in the materiality of everyday life. His wisdom smells of soap, sweat, coffee, and dampness. It wears a clean shirt, drags wooden clogs, sits beneath the mulberry tree, grows angry, desires, observes. The initiatory and the everyday remain inseparable, as they do in the ritual quality of the final night, when phallic loaves, warm milk, teasing, and grimaces place the archaic symbol alongside childishness and laughter. The narrative allows the elevated and the comic to inhabit the same scene, protecting the experience from solemn idealisation.

The morning has a different tone. Michalis wakes and feels his body to be new, as though it had been taken apart and reassembled by craftsmen, and this is perhaps the most essential moment of the initiation, because the body acquires for him a greater value and authority. The body of embarrassment, comparison, adolescent display, and curiosity becomes a lived body. Immediately afterwards, the friends wash and talk about trivial things, as though language were returning to the shelter of everyday life at the very moment when experience has already exceeded its capacities.

This silence will follow them. Thirty years later, the embarrassment surrounding the hammam, selective forgetting, and evasiveness constitute the mature form of that morning, while Daniel’s old prediction, “you will forget all of it,” is fulfilled in a way that the novella itself transforms into an irony of memory. The sequence of events has blurred, many images have disappeared, adult life has covered over what happened long ago, while the body continues to preserve a smell, a mark, a mole, a sound. Forgetting thus becomes the dark medium of memory, the environment within which a few traces acquire their paradoxical endurance.

The hammam therefore becomes something more than the site of erotic initiation. It is the architectural form of this mnemonic process, an enclosed space of successive rooms, heat, humidity, steam, nakedness, entrances and exits, where the adolescent removes his clothes, exposes himself, undergoes experience, washes, dresses, and returns to the town carrying with him what he had apparently left behind. Thirty years later, the mature Michalis retraces the same route in reverse, returning from the town to the abandoned place in order to encounter what had once been left behind in its steam. The first entrance led toward experience, the second toward the memory of experience, and between them lies an entire life.

From the Hammam to the Sea

Yet the sea has already begun to appear within the earlier life of the hammam. When the boys wish Daniel a long enough life to “make men” of their own children as well, he predicts that the hammam will survive only a few more years and that “your children will go to the beaches, to the sea.” The observation records an actual change in social habits and simultaneously anticipates a deeper movement within the book, from the enclosed space of bodily sociability to the open space of the shore, from the sheltered nakedness of steam to the exposure of the body to light. Daniel has already named the sea before the narrative takes him there.

His death, by contrast, reaches Michalis as old information, almost as something he ought already to have known. The search for his grave leads to the ossuary, where the bones of many people lie intermingled, and the narrator, with his characteristic macabre humour, entertains the thought that such intimate mingling might constitute a kind of posthumous vindication for Daniel, a final incorporation into society freed from the reservations that attended his presence while he was alive. The image simultaneously functions as an inversion of the hammam. There, every body possessed uniqueness, temperature, smell, hair, wounds, marks, and weight. In the ossuary, bodies have become common, anonymous matter. Narrative retrieves Daniel from this anonymity and grants him another form of survival.

Once his practical obligations on the island are complete, Michalis decides to travel to Chania to see Iordanis, and his desire is as simple as possible: to take his son in his arms and give him two or three kisses “out of the blue.” The boy’s adolescence had opened the father’s path back toward his own adolescence, and the return to the memory of that earlier body now gives rise to a new capacity for tenderness. Retrospection thus acquires a direction toward the present and toward the future. The journey through the ruins returns to living time. And it is precisely then that Daniel goes to the sea.

The final scene moves away from any plausible reconstruction of an actual event and assumes the freedom of vision. Young men carrying thyrsoi, ivy, staffs, and palm branches, men bearing Daniel’s bier, women and familiar figures from the vanished world all form a procession toward the shore, bringing together within a single image festival, religious procession, triumph, and funeral cortege. Ambiguity is the essence of the scene. Daniel is carried as a dead man and at the same time is fully alive. He bears the dignity of an honoured elder and is being taken to a beach where, a little later, everyone will eat, talk, laugh, and do, with the narrator’s wonderfully demythologising precision, “what people do on beaches.”

Everyday life thereby saves the procession from the gravity of apotheosis. The mythic stature bestowed upon Daniel by memory returns to flesh. Private experience has been transformed into an open image, and memory, having begun with fragments, now fully assumes its creative power.

The Future Tense of Narrative

Here we encounter the novella’s boldest temporal shift. The dead Daniel passes into the future tense. “He will not hear them,” “he will turn his head toward the west,” “he will close his eyes,” “he will open them again.” Grammar reverses the natural direction of remembrance and grants a man of the past the grammar of “will.” Daniel himself is dead and his name is receding from collective memory. Within the narrative, however, he is granted a future, for he will turn his head toward the sun each time the act of reading reaches that final shore. The future tense becomes the tense of literary survival.

And after the thyrsoi, the palm branches, the bier, and the ritual imagery, the novella chooses to preserve Daniel in the smallest and most material of gestures. He watches the sun slip behind the small cloud of vapour and, with his tongue, spreads “a thin film of saliva over his dry lips.” Mouth, tongue, saliva, dryness: an almost imperceptible movement containing within it the work’s entire insistence upon the body, as though narrative were protecting the human being from the abstraction of the symbol by preserving what appears insignificant.

The body becomes an archive of time, while language assumes an analogous function, since Michalis’s contemporary, urban, self-ironic voice coexists with Daniel’s speech, and dialectal phrases such as tha zgei kai tha vasilevgei (“it will live and reign”) or tha paainoune stis paralies (“they will go to the beaches”) preserve, together with meaning, the sound of a voice and, with it, a world that has ceased to exist in its former shape.

Epilogue: The Second Initiation

Seen in this light, particular weight also attaches to the authorial note preceding the published text, which states that all the characters, including the narrator, are invented and at the same time autonomous in relation to their creator. Michalis asks to be approached as an autonomous fictional consciousness, with memories, evasions, desires, and needs of reconstruction that are his own, and the deeper question of the book consequently shifts away from the external certainty of what exactly happened and toward the far more fertile territory in which a human being, three decades later, attempts to give form to what happened within him.

The novella thereby exceeds the familiar pattern of a coming-of-age narrative, since the first coming of age has already taken place long before Michalis’s journey begins. What is now at stake is a second, retrospective initiation, during which the mature man returns to the moment of his earliest bodily knowledge and discovers the place that experience continues to occupy within his present identity.

It is precisely there, at the moment when Michalis is finally able to leave the island and turn toward his son, that the narrative leads Daniel to the sea, away from the hammam that preserved within its steam the secret temperature of bodies and toward the open horizon where light abolishes walls, so that the phrase Daniel Goes to the Sea, with the almost childlike clarity of its syntax, ultimately comes to contain the entire distance from body to memory, from steam to horizon, from decay to image, and from “was” to “will be.” Having begun his journey by guessing at the island more than seeing it, Michalis comes, with the same profound sensory precision, to imagine the dead Daniel and to show that literature sometimes begins at precisely the point where memory, having lost the certainty of fact, acquires the radiance of form.

© Dimitrios Bosnakis