Maria hardly remembers her wedding. That pleasant agitation forever remained in the dark; instead she remembers that dream, the morning she awoke and for the first time didn’t know what she felt – misery or bliss. Happiness? Oh, reality is so complicated, it demands definitions and explanations. But there was no time for that. Soon a scandal erupted over the breaking off of the engagement, which was hushed up even sooner, and she felt an insuperable sense of shame, intensified by the futile efforts to conceal her joy, a joy not of the ephemeral kind but accompanied by the tranquillity that comes when you know it will last forever; that utter sense of the divine when she saw Yorgos at the door of her parents’ house. She felt all this had already been, as if she was seeing him ask for her hand again, watching their wedding once more, and having their five children all over again.
My Grandmother
‘Where is he? Why is he late? All right, I always come a little early just in case, but he should have passed by already, like every other day. How do I look? Is he going to come? Is he going to give me a piece of chocolate today too?’
* * *
Although that war brought with it the dangerous competition of other events and impressions, for little Ekaterini, my grandmother, it was and remained about the pilot whom she sat and waited for in the same place every day. She sat there on a step, unconvincingly pretending not to be waiting there on purpose; and then he’d come along, tall and smiling, in the most beautiful uniform, even from a distance dispelling everything else she longed for and even overcoming the longing itself. She watched him walk up; he stopped and offered her a piece of chocolate, without a word but always with a smile. She saw her hand and the shame on her impish face. That was her first and, as she said, greatest love. Not even ninety years from the day the pilot stopped coming could anyone make her stop believing in it, nor did anyone try. She had got to know love. Love is a secret we cannot convey even if we want to. Everyone receives this gift and cultivates it or does with it what they wish. Love is only inside you – indivisible, incommunicable, and thus inherently shielded from all the perplexities which tend to accompany other feelings: is it real or am I imagining it? Concerns of quantity and quality. But love is one word. It exists only because people need speech. Love has it all.
Ekaterini always thought of her mother, Maria, as a proper lady who wore elegant dresses, just as she remembered her from when she was a very little girl, from the time before the wars. Her ‘real’ mother wasn’t this woman without an apron, or wearing that apron constantly over her only dressing gown – the ‘uniform’ she didn’t managed to change between the Second Balkan War of 1913 and the First World War. This woman didn’t tie her hair up into a bun; her dangling locks were like a raucous voice vying with the clamour of war. The world Ekaterini wanted to live in could be found in only two places – mothballed up in the attic, and absorbed in the infinity of a gaze devoted to the sea. We can only devote ourselves to the sea completely, although, or rather because, it demands nothing of us. It accepts us imperceptibly with its mute plenty, open for us to read all our thoughts into it. The sea – and peace and drama and pure beauty and blue and grey and green and solace and promise and just that gaze. A world in itself -independent, self-sufficient -and the never-ending call for us to abandon ourselves to it.
I want to be like the sea, Ekaterini often thought when she heard the explosions of war. But she also felt this in the years of peace, the good life, poverty, love and loneliness. She remained constant as far as the sea was concerned, equally devoted – both as a girl of seven who stole out of the house to go down to the water by herself for the first time, and as an old lady of ninety eight, captive in continental Europe and so far from the sea.
The attic was locked. Her brothers and sisters came to accept this as a fact and soon forgot about it, caught up as they were in everything that was happening in the rest of the house, in the street and the world. For Ekaterini, the attic presented a challenge, first and foremost. She was allured by exactly that declaration of impossibility, of the place being inaccessible, and also by the desire to defy the will of her parents, which her brothers and sisters considered indisputable. She couldn’t stand anyone else making decisions for her; any at all, even if it was something as simple as the choice of nightie before bed. Dead-ends made her laugh – human stupidity, the need for mystification, any kind of weakness. There’s always a path, you just need to find it. And indeed, in the courtyard there was a pine tree, unusual for that clime, and therefore probably forgotten in the company of fig and almond trees, lemon and olive frees, vegetable patches and the ubiquitous chickens. She raised her eyes, calmly and searchingly, and noticed that the pine tree’s branches were leaning on the house, and then she saw the open attic window.
Out of breath from climbing and cautious lest her steps on the decrepit parquetry gave her away, Ekaterini knew she wouldn’t have long for the marvels she felt a premonition of, even before she set eyes on the ‘enchanted room’. Amidst the order of neatly stacked boxes and other stored objects, which her mother Maria had managed to create here too, stood a large seaman’s trunk which dominated the attic. It wasn’t locked, which calmed the girl’s racing breath, because it meant that no one expected her there. To her surprise, she found she could raise the heavy lid. And from that moment on, she felt she had been literally transported to a different world. How divine! Such dresses, their collars adorned with imitation feathers of various colours, sashes, lace, garters, stockings... What designs, what colours! She chose a colour, managed to wriggle into the dress, wound a matching sash around her neck and adroitly threw the end over her shoulder. She slipped her feet into her mother’s shoes with particular relish. They immediately enchanted her more than everything else. She admired her new appearance for a few moments in the large antique mirror with the carved frame, and then used the rest of the time to walk in the shoes, which were at least five sizes too big for her.
Although she had to be doubly careful now, due to the size of her feet, she herself was surprised how much she enjoyed it. More than trying on the dresses, which she had longed to do since first seeing them, and more than the shoes themselves – it was the act of walking that thrilled her. Those unexpected steps made her laugh and at the same time gave her the indescribable satisfaction of a completely new feeling. She was important. But no longer just to herself: it was as if she had entered the world of importance. For the first time she looked grown up and ladylike. She couldn’t have imagined just how much this experience would put her in touch with her true desires and stimulate them to become clearer, more pronounced and far from the daily humdrum of waiting for the pilot and his chocolate. In her mind, she heard a question she had never imagined before: what would she like to be when she grew up, in other words soon, when all this was over. I’m a proper lady! she thought, and it stuck. From that day on, the whole world just looked like an introduction, something preparatory, a boring interim she had to go through to get to the proper life.
* * *
My grandmother could easily have become a Chavela Vargas or an even more famous singer-songwriter. Refractory as she always was, Ekaterini wisely kept quiet about her aspiration to play the guitar and sing, knowing that the mere mention of such an idea would cause a scene, at the very least: ‘Our