Stolen oranges

Thanassis Cambanis

Daphne took me to Mycenae when I was in first grade and she was 58, and we were both temporarily living in Athens. My father was on sabbatical and Daphne on a Fulbright, researching a novel she never completed. It was 1981. I don’t remember how it came to pass that I left for a solo trip with this mirthful family friend, but I remember that I wanted to go, and that I was also nervous to travel without my mother.

Here’s what I remember. First off Daphne instructed me to lie about my age to the bus conductor so she could pay the under-five fare for me. When we neared Argos, the bus left us on the main road, miles from the tourist area and archaeological site. As we walked, I grew hungry and tired. Daphne instructed me to scale a fence and steal oranges from a farmer’s orchard. I was terrified.

“I’ll get caught,” I said.

“You won’t!” she replied with her maniacal grin.

Hunger was persuasive. In the orchard I picked some oranges and hurried back to the fence.

“More, more!” Daphne instructed, until I had gathered as many as fit in my shirt. I threw them over the fence to Daphne who secreted them into her bag. Back on the road, we feasted on the fruits, spitting the seeds as far as we could. We stayed in a decrepit, cheap hostel with a shared bathroom. At dinnertime a large party was sharing a platter piled high with lamb, which wasn’t on the menu. Daphne sent me to ask questions — it turned out to be a wedding party — and eventually they sent platefuls of meat to our table.

That night in the unheated room I shivered beneath a single itchy wool blanket. I didn’t want to venture down the long hall by myself to the shared bathroom. Daphne encouraged me to pee off the small balcony into street below. I remember little of the site of Mycenae itself, although it was the main objective of our trip — the place where Agamemnon lived and died, where Orestes killed his mother in the seminal act of violence that led eventually to the Ancient Greek idea of justice. Argos spawned stories, which were always Daphne’s true objective. The ruins were just a pretext for an adventure.

Daphne had merged with our family long before I was born, and she appears in my earliest memories. The trip to Mycenae was the first of many vivid moments with Daphne — moments shared with everyone who knew her. She invited accomplices to join her adventures, and cared not a bit for convention. She was curious, and as a traveler at least, fearless. She was having fun and wanted to share it. This was Daphne at her best: infectiously joyful, intellectually stimulating, generous with her mind. She challenged the ideas of others but took them seriously. She cut through bullshit and lazy thinking. She cared about ideas, stories, and her own joy. She didn’t like to waste words or money.

Everyone close to Daphne seems to have travel stories that feature cheap accommodations and rich conversation. In her seventies, she broke her leg visiting the Acropolis. She made her last trip to Greece in 2015, at the age of 91. Daphne was supremely at ease everywhere, which was a good thing since she never seemed to stop moving. She always set her sights on the place where she had put herself, not the next destination.

A few weeks after Daphne’s death, I sat alone on the front deck of her poorly built shack in the woods that, like Daphne, hardly feels of this era. A family of deer rested by the rotting wooden fence, built as cheaply as possible with the bark edges thrown away at lumber yards. In my first memories of Daphne, from my childhood, she already seemed fantastically old. Her bulbous facial features telegraphed her intent with alarming elasticity. Back then in the 1970s, her little house already was crumbling. A movable bookshelf in her bedroom hid a secret passage to the attic where she kept her treasures: letters, manuscripts, extra copies of her own books.

She wanted nothing superfluous. In her study she wrote on a door placed on sawhorses, first on a typewriter, then a word processor, and eventually a Mac. She was agnostic about technology for her writing, but irritated with the false gospel of internet evangelists.

Once when I was very young she invited our family to a barbeque. She grilled some chicken on a pit she dug in the ground. We left hungry but happy, and never ate at Daphne’s again. She came to our house instead, and sang for her supper, sometimes literally.

Daphne taught me by example to engage and be present, or else not to bother. Everyone, and especially an artist, needed financial autonomy and daily discipline. She swam fifty laps every day in the university pool, tracing a comically slow path through the water with her mask and snorkel and loose stroke. She kept her body limber and strong into her nineties through the same dogged discipline with which she wrote.

She did what she wanted, and was considered monstrously egotistical by some; she rarely engaged with the pieties of others. When she wanted to dismiss some idea or person, she would hold her nose with one hand and pantomime pulling a flush toilet cord with the other, gleefully crying “Crapola!” Farts didn’t embarrass her. She wore hand-me-down t-shirts and on international trips carried a single change of clothing from country to country in a jute handbag, the type people now carry to the farmer’s market for their vegetables. She never minded the style of poverty in which she grew up, and never saw a need to change lifestyle later when she had plenty of money.

People complained about Daphne but still sought her company. Selfish, maybe, but absolutely energizing. Surrounded by examples of duty, nostalgia, and compromise, Daphne exemplified freedom. She brought the spirit of the Algonquin Round Table, as I imagined it, to Chapel Hill in the 1980s. The artist can create community anywhere, she argued by example, not just in Manhattan or interwar Paris.

Plenty of adults formed families, made compromises, volunteered in the community. Daphne offered a different template altogether: She joyously did what she wanted, damning — and ridiculing — those who got in her way. She gave freely of her time as a teacher and critic, as a labor of love, not a noble sacrifice. She didn’t linger over the hurt feelings of friends. Daphne starred in my childhood as a fairy-tale creature and remains a wonder and an exemplar for me today, when I’m a middle-aged parent.

She taught, she created, she entertained herself, and she made it look like a hoot. In her old age she didn’t moon around wondering if she should have had children or married. She relentlessly lived the present. She was equally enthused about many places where she lived and wrote: Chapel Hill, Pylos, New York City, post-war London and France, even the Shah’s Tehran. How, I asked her as a young adult chafing at North Carolina’s strictures, could she tolerate Chapel Hill after living in so many more interesting places? She rejected the premise. Only boring people, Daphne believed, get bored.