The charms of shopping have never been more celebrated than in this most delicate and intriguing poem about mutual and tacit recognition. He Was Asking about the Quality— (Πὠτoυσε για την πoιóτητα—) elaborates on a moment of successful intersubjective gaze by projecting ironically libidinal, epistemological, and ontological questions in its title.

Walking idly about the streets, a young man—“Beautiful / and interesting—so that he appeared to have reached / his fullest sensual yield” (l. 7–9)—sees in a little shop a figure that attracts him. He enters pretending to ask about the quality of the handkerchiefs. The matter at hand, however, is quite a different one.

The veiled acquiescence of the third stanza answers successfully the latent question at hand: What kind of man are you? Here, language functions surreptitiously, handkerchiefs allegorically signifying something else. Disguised and subdued, language almost seems redundant or incidental; but its failure or weakness to express the unspeakable turns into the crucial communicative gestures (“choked voice . . . faded” and “distracted . . . low voice”) that let each other know that they stand on common ground.

Once the quality of “the handkerchiefs” has been established—the critical ontological question of the poem—the two men, the clerk and the customer, achieve “their only aim: the touching of their hands / over the handkerchiefs, the coming closer of their faces, of their lips / as if by chance, a momentary contact of the limbs.”

Such successful recognition scenes are a further elaboration of the discourse of secrecy and concealment that we find in Cavafy in many guises. Our ability to recognize this discourse inevitably involves a subjective engagement and a willingness to see beyond and below the obvious and the literal; the recognition of such a discourse, in other words, calls for suspicious readings.

But the poem is not a simple paean to the efficacy of gay cruising practices. It is also a poem about urban alienation and freedom, of cautious transgression, and ever-present surveillance as is evident from the last two lines.

Categories: Literature, World Literature

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