29 janeiro 2025

SO FAR, FOR BEAUTY


 Over the wall, the treetops delicately peeked out over the top of the open-air movie screen, which belonged to the Hydra film club. In a few moments, the last concert that Leonard Cohen had given in his life would be shown, the first of two sessions prepared for the 218 people who had come to Greece for the 8th Meetup around Cohen and the first after his death. Sometimes Marianne Ihlen, the best known of his muses, participated in these meetings.

As I had dinner at Dusko, right next to the cinema, on the same terrace that Mr. Cohen and Marianne frequented over the years they lived on the island, I arrived very early and was able to choose any of the 140 canvas chairs with backrests that lined the empty space. “Sisters of Mercy,” cautiously spread by a column, assured me that I had entered the right event, as there was nothing on the cinema’s facade to indicate what would happen inside. At the box office, no one was selling tickets and only one man was hurriedly scribbling PRIVATE SESSION on a paper note glued with adhesive tape on the door. The Greeks on duty just smiled when I asked if I could come in, and they didn't check my name against any list or even force me to pronounce the holy name in devotion that night. Perfect night, there was even a June full moon in the sky.

Dusko tavern, Hydra.

Then the guests started arriving and those who didn't know each other from Café Roloi started talking, wondering where they were from: behind me, for example, were two Algerians, to my left sat a Danish woman who must have been a sensual babe a few decades before; a German woman who I had already stumbled upon at Krifo Limani, one of the tavernas in the Port of Hydra, arrived at the row seat preceding mine and who, by her discreet pose, I thought was an ordinary tourist and not one of those retarded hippies who revealed themselves by the T-shirts printed with song titles, album names or song fragments. In the blink of an eye I counted a Dance me to the end of love, an Ain´t no cure for love, two Songs of love and hate. Also part of the horde of fans, who dotted the paths and stairs of Hydra, were a handful of concentration campers sporting on their skin the Order of the United Heart, a tattoo of two intertwined hearts that mimic a Star of David and are part of the iconography designed by Cohen himself.

Marianne and son, Leonard & friend, Port of Hydra, 1960.
 (picture of photo posted at the Café Roloi, 2017).
The screen hiccups with the first images and for the next three hours I watched, first surprised and then not so much, which was usual in a live Leonard Cohen show, when he himself was alive. People clapped a lot, people were flooded by the emotion with which he reached their innermost being, they cried... But in something that is happening second hand!? Yes, yes, at first it was all very timid, perhaps there was still a hint of rational ceremony in the air, but soon — like ectoplasm from the real concert spectators projected onto the sheet — we found ourselves clapping at the end of each song; we applaud every time Mr. Cohen would take off his hat, cover his heart with it, and name the musicians and the corner of the globe they came from.

Hydra Cineclub.
Leonard Cohen's last concert in life (Dublin, Ireland) opened with “Dance Me to the End of Love,” a song that seems to speak of joyful, eternal love when, in fact, it invokes the ragtag prison orchestras that were forced to play on the path of the condemned to the gas chambers and remembers the children who were left unborn in the bellies of their mothers, roasted in the crematorium ovens. After all, Mr. Cohen was Jewish, born when Hitler was coming to power, he was just lucky that his native Canada was too far away... In front of me the discreet German woman sank her chin into the palm of her hand, her fingertips touching her eyelids. It was limpid that she was weeping in silence, that what L. Cohen provoked in all of us was happening to her: what he sang became ours, ours, or it worked as a consolation, a light pat on our shoulder, a “go on, weep, I'll be here to keep you company.” I felt like discreetly tapping the German woman on the shoulder, and I hoped the Algerian wouldn't do the same to me. 

After an hour and a half the first break arrived. I woke up and put on the coat that, fortunately, I had brought with me: the night suddenly has grown colder. Like others, I came to the street to clear my head and stretch my legs; the German woman was smoking alone, sitting on a bench, as if she were waiting for a late bus.

In the brief speech he gave us at the beginning of the session, Jarkko Arjatsalo — the Finn responsible for Leonard Cohen's official website and the driving force behind the periodic meetings in Hydra — informed us of the program of the festivities for the following day: at 7 pm, the inauguration of the garden bench in honor and memory of Leonard Cohen will take place, and in the evening, at 9, promoted by the Municipality of Hydra, a concert with Greek musicians, during which songs by the favorite author will be performed. “Please show yourself,” Jarkko asked with the vowels hissing of ‘vv’. But there was no need to ask, after all we were all there because of Mr. Cohen and despite there being too many of us to fit at the same table in the local tavernas — the name used in Greece to refer to what we call restaurants — we never failed to show up where we were supposed to. Still in the morning... Still that Saturday morning, as I turned a corner of the paths that would take me to Kamini, I came across a devotee sitting on a step, under the shade cast by Leonard's house on the island, reading from a little book in a low but audible voice. I walked by very slowly, observing the exuberant fuchsia of the bougainvillea climbing over the doorstep, so as not to disturb anyone and to be able to understand that the lady was reading poems by L. Cohen. I didn't plan on stopping, but at the end of the narrow street (where, if a donkey goes by on a leash in the opposite direction, we'll have to stick to the wall) I was intrigued by a rectangular stain, the same deep blue as the Mediterranean, on the whitewash wall bordering Mr.'s Cohen backyard. Ah!, it was the sign I had heard about: the Municipality Council had decided to name the path after the famous person who had lived there. It was heard, in the gatherings that kept the Roloi lit up with songs and conversation until six in the morning, that Adam Cohen, Leonard's son and heir, had opposed such an idea. On the Roloi esplanade there were those who were passionately for or against the toponymic plaque.

“What does that mean?” I asked, exposing the camera's viewfinder to the young man who was serving me at the table under the green needle trellis of The Little Pine, the restaurant in Kamini where you can see the blue of the sea through the green branches: OΔΟΣ.

“Street... Leonard Cohen Street,” he replied, “in Greek, the word ‘Street’ comes before the name of the street.”

“In Portuguese too,” I countered.

In Hydra I almost always follow this route, it suits me: I go to the tiny port of Kamini through the alleys and lanes that start from the upper part of the town, because I like to take a look at the white and grey house (the colours of the houses in Hydra) belonging to Mr. L. Cohen, of looking at the rusty pole where you can still see the porcelain goblets where the telephone wires that inspired the first verse of “Bird on the Wire” once ran; to see that a fig belonging to Mr. Cohen garden had fallen onto the worn paving stones of the street; that the lemons in the backyard shine like Chinese lanterns that someone forgot to blow out and that, on the contrary, in the orange trees you can't tell the green of the fruit from the green of the foliage. And, I confess, sometimes I sit on the same step where the devoted reader was, thinking about nothing and resting from the hundreds of steps I have already climbed.

You can get to Kamini (he used to go to the beach here; more than one poem happened to him here, he signed them as such) by going down my current terraces and returning to the Port of Hydra via the little coastal road, always with the certainty that you won't find cars or motorcycles or even bicycle maniacs. On the island of Hydra there are only donkeys and mules for transport, which is why you can hear the bells so loudly, the crowing of the roosters at dawn, the exfoliating of the cicadas, the anguished roar of the boats preparing to leave the island pier. Following that path is like traveling on a Yellow Brick Road or something like that, in the background of the landscape the comforting line of the Peloponnese reminds us that a man is not an island and, between the lines, the islands that dot the deep blue with stone, one of them rises a tiny chapel on the surface of the water. Who will you serve?
Road from Kamini to Port of Hydra.

On a bend in the road, there is a recent building, it looks like an archaeological remains in a new state; a U-shaped stone wall where, at the back, they fixed a light wooden crossbar. It's the bench offered by subscription from the Cohen Fan Forum — hosted by Jarkko on his website —, I can infer from the small commemorative plaque screwed onto one of the outer faces. The location was well chosen, whoever rests there has a view of infinity and could have sat there three thousand years ago. It will be inaugurated later this afternoon, there is a striped orange and white plastic ribbon threatening it. The mayor will first give a brief speech, joking about the Greek bureaucracy that prevented it from being inaugurated while the honoree was still alive; by the way, he will ask for a minute of silence; someone will sing a Leonard Cohen song, followed by another about him and romanticizing the film too much... Next to me, squeezed by the crowd of people, the lady who read poems at the door of Mr. Cohen strikes up a conversation with me, and I ask, in the bard's language, what she read in the morning. 

“Where are you from anyway?” she asks me.

“Around Lisbon,” I reply.

“Ah, it had to be... And look at us, the only ones here speaking Portuguese! I'm from Viana do Castelo...”

This is her first time in Hydra and she knows everything about his idol, she has been attending Roloi like a church; she must be in her late thirties, she's foul-mouthed, she's overflowing, and when I reveal that one of the things Cohen wrote in Hydra was the poem of "Alexandra Leaving," she surprises me with an:

“Oh, don’t talk to me about other bitches! For me it all comes down to Marianne, I don't want to know anymore...”

I smell danger in the warm evening: it's almost eight at night and it must be about thirty five degrees Celsius. Too close to my eyes the back of a fan's T-shirt – which reads Like a drunk in a midnight choir – is covered in sweat.

“Well, I must be going,” I say, “I don’t want to be late for the show and I still want to stop at the hotel before dinner... 

“Wait, don’t go yet,” she begs, “I want to introduce Henning to you.” He's German and has some fantastic stories about Leonard...”

And while she moves among the people present, looking for Henning, I walk away at a leisurely pace, without looking back, as Bob Dylan advises.

Leonard Cohen's bench at Hydra.

They chose for the concert the spontaneous square marked by the facade of the museum and the Port pier, right next to the place where, every hour, the ferries arrive from Athens and the other islands of the Saronic Gulf. Nowadays, the trip to Athens takes just over an hour, but when Mr. Cohen came here to visit for the first time, there was a boat twice a week and the connection took five hours.

Every wooden electric pole has a poster stapled to it, the usual way of advertising events on the island. The Municipality Council sent for a band with bass, guitar, drums and vocals from the mainland; the singer addresses the audience, calling us “you guys”, defines the group as being jazz, announces that they will perform songs from their new album and that they will do their own versions of some of the honoree’s songs. I fear the worst. However, the public waits patiently, they have faith: the venue is packed, there is not a single chair to be occupied, there are even people sitting on the old cannons that defended the island from pirates and Turks. There are hundreds of us and now there are many Greeks mixed in, something that did not happen in the previous stages of the festivities. The music plays and powerful projectors intermittently dazzle the audience with a jet of lilac color. The band's future CD on stage is uninteresting, the compositions uninspired, and the singer's voice formats the songs in a pattern that makes them indistinguishable. At the end of the second song I had already seen everything there was to see and I stood up, as it was not worth waiting for a miracle when it was the time for Mr. Leonard Cohen’s covers. On the Roloi esplanade I walked around my fellow countrywoman, who was already sitting there — she also gave up on the show.

The night is full and the moon continues to be full. As I climb the 149 steps that take me from Porto to the hotel, the same ones that the honoree descended every day to come from home to the town center, I can't help but hear the music clearly, as if I were still at the concert. The town of Hydra stands in an amphitheater, in a cascade, wedged between the sea and the hills, and this configuration gives it wonderful acoustics. I now finally identify a song by Mr. Cohen. It's “Hallelujah” and the young musicians didn't give up on twisting it to their personal taste, they finish it off in the reinterpretation. Anyway... I arrived at the street where my hotel is located, I stopped to catch my breath, the music continued to reach me clearly: “First We Take Manhattan”. Mr. L. Cohen greek house is located just a hundred meters from where I am staying and just as it happened in 1967 — when he listened from his window to the sounds being played at Dusko — today I can hear the songs he wrote then, rising in the air like the singing of a drunk at midnight.

Port of Hydra by dawn.

© With the exception of the third photo (Marianne and Leonard & friend), all photographs by Pedro Serrano, Hydra (Greece), 2017. 

    

Sem comentários:

Enviar um comentário