Three Summers Page 3

  “Mama, do you love me?”

  “It’s no time for talking, Katerina, go to sleep.”

  “Zezina, do you love me?”

  “Are you still awake? Tomorrow I’ll put you to bed a half hour earlier.”

  “Infanta, Maria, do you love me?”

  “What’s gotten into you tonight?”

  They all laughed.

  Mlle. Zina, who we often called Zezina, knew all the Becassine stories, but I liked Sans Famille best of all. At that time I firmly believed that comedy made life uglier, whereas tragedy enhanced it. I would read Sans Famille and cry, and feel great satisfaction. As the adventures and misfortunes of Remi increased, the stronger and more worthy of living I felt.

  I loved Mlle. Zina a lot after she left. You see, while she was with us I had the sense that she was holding me back, that she would not let me do the things I wanted to do. This conviction, especially as it was unjustified, was all the more intense.

  She was Swiss, and she had rosy cheeks with little red veins. I heard her talk so often about William Tell that even today I can’t help but think that he is the greatest hero of all times. She also told me about the creamy Swiss milk, the snow-covered peaks, and the tarts that came out of her father’s oven, steaming hot. I imagined myself sledding down from the highest peak and arriving with incredible speed right in front of the door of her father’s bakery. I would leave the sled in the street. There you can leave whatever you want in the street, even money. No one steals. And I would help myself to one tart with apricots and one with strawberries. My empty mouth began to water; the make-believe smell of the hot pastry made my nostrils quiver. “There are even strawberries in the woods,” said Mlle. Zina. “If you just go for a walk you fill a whole basket. But I couldn’t eat them. If I put one in my mouth I would come down with a fever and chills.”

  It was really true. One time I remember I convinced her to try two strawberries from the garden, “just to see if you get the chills,” and not a half an hour had passed before she was in bed almost unconscious.

  We tortured her, poor dear. We would get her really angry so her blood would go to her head, and the tiny red veins in her cheeks would turn purple, and then we’d just laugh. But we mustn’t forget that she was good, that it was she in fact who had chased away the fear that the other governess, Miss Gost, had instilled in us. Miss Gost would get up in the middle of the night and start playing the violin and hang white sheets over the mirrors. She would take us on long walks in the woods where she would make us sit obediently around her, and she would tell us how our souls had first belonged to other people or animals before us and how they would belong to them again when we died.

  It really expanded my imagination to think of losing my soul, of it flying away like a bird. And if in another life I became a horse and the coachmen whipped me in the street?

  “And it’s for my next life that I’m learning the violin,” she added with a look full of exaltation. “And if you become a pig or a cat, Miss Gost, how will you play the violin?” I remember asking her one day, laughing loudly, although my palms were sweaty from nervousness. “Nonsense,” she muttered, white as a sheet. Miss Gost was always ashen pale; her hair was shiny and black, tucked behind her ears, and her dresses brightly colored.

  Nights were hard on me at that time; I couldn’t get to sleep, and when I finally did, my dreams were terrifying. Often I’d see a wave of sand passing before my eyes, and then it would blind me. I would try to open my eyelashes but they wouldn’t open. I’d wake the whole house with my screams. Even now I’m unsure whether the wave of sand that blinded me was a dream or a product of my excited, sleepless imagination.

  So we owed a lot to Zezina, who never talked to us about how our soul would leave us and instead let us run around and play, and whose insipid Swiss tales made for calm nights of sleep, all the rest forgotten. Her cheeks were rosy, not ashen pale, which in itself was something; her hair was a very light brown, with a few white hairs at her brow, which, though carefully plucked, would only multiply, forming a beautiful white crown. This bothered her immensely, though we insisted that it suited her.

  Sunday was our day with Father, and it was always tense and melancholic. When we were with him all we could think about was when we were apart—that is, most of the time. So we always schemed up something crazy, something that would distract us totally: an excursion in his car to a faraway beach, some theater show that wasn’t appropriate for our age, a film with horses running like mad across endless hills, or one with strange women. Once, I remember, we saw Greta Garbo kill an officer as he sat there in an armchair and then, because someone knocked on the door, proceed to talk in the most natural way, sitting on the arm of the chair next to the corpse pretending to caress him and flirt with him.

  When Monday dawned we would tell everything to Marios, everything we’d seen and heard. Usually the sun wasn’t even up yet and he would be over at our house ready to play, or so he said, but we knew he really came to find out what had happened. We’d start off pretending we didn’t know why he was there. We’d decide what game to play. Then he would say, looking up at the sky,

  “What day is today?”

  “Monday. Why?”

  “Oh, to figure out which classes I have homework in.”

  “Ahhh.”

  We couldn’t last, though. Maria was the first to give in.

  “You should have seen it, Marios . . .” We’d sit down in a circle on the ground, and minutes would turn to hours, whole days, lifetimes.

  •

  The frogs have gone mad recently. It’s the ones who live in the reeds on Aniksi Avenue, across from the doctor’s, who start it all. You see, the large stream passes by there on its way down from Kefalari to water the fields, and the sound and the taste of the water, its color which is really a thousand colors, gets them drunk. The others hear them and answer. Then ours answer back, infrequently and measured at first, then more and more insistently, until they make a sound that wraps the whole garden like a night robe, their voice, without coloratura, like calm itself, while at other times frenzied, mad, as if in a paroxysmic fit. And there is one old frog whose husky voice makes it all seem very funny.

  Usually at that time of day my sisters and I count the stars, letting the moon settle on our hair. But Maria gets this wild look.

  “What are you thinking?” I ask her. We are outside, lying on our backs with our hands behind our heads.

  “About bullfights.”

  I start to laugh.

  “Yes,” she whispers in my ear, “just imagine: the red sheet, the seething bulls, the men stabbing them with knives, or watching their own insides spill out. The women fanning themselves, waiting to give themselves to the winner; their pleasure, all beginning with the spectacle.”

  What strange things Maria said. I look at her. Of course she is twenty years old, but nonetheless . . .

  “Nonsense,” says Infanta, and gets up to leave.

  She goes to keep Aunt Theresa company. The two of them are inseparable. They embroider difficult patterns and read big books.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Maria continues. “She doesn’t know a thing about life. And she never will. She’ll stay thick as a brick until she dies.”

  The frogs were already loud. The old frog hadn’t joined in yet.

  “You know everything’s over with Nikos. Stefanos and Eleni are a part of our group now, and Eleni happened to like Nikos more, while I happened to like Stefanos. So we kind of traded.”

  And when I didn’t say anything:

  “What? So you’re going to play Miss Self-Righteous like Infanta?”

  “No, Maria, it’s not that . . .”

  The trees bend down to strangle me, my legs turn to lead, the moon looks fake. Stefanos, Maria, Eleni, Nikos . . . If things are that way, who am I to expect more?

  “Why don’t you pay attention to Marios?” I ask. “He loves you. When he comes here he can’t take his eyes off you, and whenever I meet hi
m in the street he asks about you.”

  “Ugh. He’s a wimp, so thin, without any life in him.” She rolls back and forth in the grass.

  “I know that he’s crazy about me.”

  Silence.

  “Just between you and me, Katerina, the others are wimps too. Both Nikos and Stefanos. But it’s a way to pass the time.”

  I’m not like Maria. I wouldn’t let a boy touch me just to pass the time. Maybe I’ll find someone who will watch the daisies blooming in the field with me, who will cut me a branch of the first autumn berries and bring it to me with the leaves still damp. Or maybe I’ll set out to see the world alone.

  “I can’t understand the chattering that goes on between Aunt Theresa and Infanta,” Maria adds, as if we had been talking about them the whole time. “How can she go and sit inside when the grass is so soft out here? Maybe I said something? Oh yes, about bullfights. Infanta! . . . Infanta! . . .” she calls, looking toward the house, up at Aunt Theresa’s room. “Come on down! Infanta . . .”

  •

  Aunt Theresa’s room is on the top floor, somewhat separate from the rest of the house. Aunt Theresa calls it her atelier, and she wants us to call it that too. She has a little bit of furniture, an easel, and on top of a table, her palette with the colors. In the right-hand corner there are lots of finished and half-finished paintings.

  More than anything there, even more than the paintings themselves, I like to look at the palette with the colors. Those dashes of blue, orange, yellow, red, green shining there . . . Once when I was little I made a real mess; the magic of the colors tricked me into thinking that if I mixed them all together I would come up with something magnificent, something that no one had ever seen before. I remember I took all the tubes and emptied them onto the palette, put my hands in, and began to stir. When I had finished I was shocked. In front of me was a dull brown blob, not at all what I had expected. And as if the sadness wasn’t enough, I got in trouble for it too.

  Now I know that all the colors don’t go together. Aunt Theresa taught me: “Red and blue make purple; blue and yellow, green.”

  Aunt Theresa’s paintings are like carbon copies. She paints exactly what she sees, just as it is. She doesn’t miss a thing—not a leaf or a blade of grass, or even a distant cloud. Although when she paints the distant cloud she makes it look like it’s close up, and that ruins everything. But I do like a portrait she did of Infanta. Infanta is so beautiful . . . Like Botticelli’s Aphrodite, Aunt Theresa says—a chaste Aphrodite. Without a doubt she is the most beautiful of all of us. Except that Maria’s body is more lithe and shapely, and my eyes are brighter.

  Aunt Theresa paints landscapes, portraits, and natures mortes. She’s done lots of trees from our yard and from the nearby forest. But when I see them on the canvas, although they’re the same shape and color as the real ones, it’s as if they’ve lost their relationship to each other, as if each one is by itself, in its own landscape cleverly joined together by someone. As for her natures mortes, fruit is her favorite subject, particularly apricots and cut-open melons. “They’re so convincing they make me want to eat them,” she says, laughing. Me, I don’t like them. Generally I dislike natures mortes, especially ones with fruit because fruit is for tasting, feeling, and smelling.

  Infanta sits for hours in Aunt Theresa’s atelier. She says she likes the view from up there, and the quiet. Down below there are Mother’s nerves, Grandfather’s complaints, our voices, Maria’s laugh. . . . . But that quiet is unnatural, and sometimes even frightening. Like scenes remembered from nightmares in which you are hurt, or being chased, when the earth opens up to swallow you, or you want to speak but you can’t because your voice is stuck in your throat and no sound will come out, and you are trying to scream for help . . .

  Nevertheless, Aunt Theresa is a kind person, kind and cowardly. She jumps at the slightest sound; her lip begins to tremble if the wind blows harder. “Someone is coming,” she whispers. For her, “someone” is something bad. “Hmm, I think I heard something too,” I say to scare her, but also because for me “someone” is anything unknown.

  “She’s still frightened because of what happened back then,” Rodia said one evening, and then she told me the whole story.

  We were baking some sweet potatoes in front of the fire. It’s the only way to get Rodia by herself and make her talk. Because I want to know everything. I’m not indifferent like Infanta.

  “Mrs. Theresa was a young thing when it happened,” began Rodia. “The same age as Infanta, and she looked a lot like her too. They had all gone on an outing, your mother, your father, Aunt Theresa, and her fiancé, a tall young man with shiny hair and thick lips.”

  “What about me, Rodia?”

  “You weren’t even born yet. Mrs. Anna was three or four months pregnant with Maria. Anyway, there they were. After they had eaten and drunk, your mother and father lay down under some pine trees, and Aunt Theresa and her fellow decided to go for a walk. On the way they found a cave and went in to have a rest. But it seems the young man had other things on his mind . . . how should I put it . . .”

  “Come on Rodia, tell me!”

  “He made Aunt Theresa a woman against her will. There you have it. He took advantage of her.”

  “Ohhh . . .”

  I can imagine her at that moment. Outside, the sun strong, the trees motionless, resin dripping freely like wine from the trunks, the pebbles hot as coals, the insects quiet. Inside the cave is refreshingly cool, the moss damp, drops of moisture hanging from the rocks, not falling. How long can a drop hang like that in the air? And Aunt Theresa unable to give herself to him, to the experience. A shiver ran down my spine.

  “But Rodia, isn’t it true that when a woman loves a man she gives herself to him?”

  “Not before she’s married, my child—never. It’s a sin. And besides, it was the way he did it. Mrs. Theresa didn’t want to. So what was he doing? I remember her—the poor thing—after it happened. She was like a crazy woman for a while. From then on she never wanted to see him or hear about him. She couldn’t even get near another man . . .”

  Now I understand why Aunt Theresa’s voice trembles when she says “someone’s coming.” Why her trees on the canvas are separate from each other as if they belong to different landscapes. And even why her fruit has no taste, feel, or smell.

  •

  Nonetheless, lately she has been painting a lot. She stands facing the window. She surveys the property, her eye focusing on the woods, where the pine trees are short, round, close to the earth, others spindly with graceless branches reaching to the sky, all with a crown of haze, a dim crown hovering above them at midday.

  “It will be a panorama,” she says.

  Half shutting her one eye, she draws back from the easel to see better.

  “A panorama,” Infanta repeats.

  Infanta never hunches her back when she embroiders. It is always perfectly straight. When a crown of midday heat encircles her, she chases it away with one quick motion.

  “And how do you like this?”

  She spreads her embroidery out on her knees. There are peacocks, lots of peacocks with their tails fanned out. Their legs are hidden, because peacocks have ugly legs, and they know it. For a whole year Infanta’s been working on it, and it’ll take another two more years to finish. It’s going to be for Aunt Theresa’s big armchair, the one next to the window.

  “Sometimes I try to count the stitches but I get too dizzy . . .”

  Just thinking how many feathers each tail has and how many colors each feather . . . It’s a form of protection, though. When Infanta embroiders she doesn’t feel scared. Or uneasy. Or anything else.

  “It will be a masterpiece,” Aunt Theresa says loudly. “You are approaching perfection, Infanta.”

  For both of them perfection is their goal. They often talk about it. In painting, in embroidery, it doesn’t matter. Because when you embroider something beautiful you become beautiful inside, and the more beautif
ul it is, the more beautiful you become.

  “That’s why you must live alone, Infanta.”

  “Alone?” she asked.

  Now that she knows, she doesn’t ask anymore. She sits proud, upright over her embroidery with the peacocks. And each day her eyes grow more and more distant.

  I used to think she had Marios on her mind, because she blushed when she heard his whistle and saw him climbing up the hill from his house to ours, and because when he arrived instead of joking with him the way Maria and I did, she whispered a hasty greeting and went up to the atelier.

  One day when I caught her following him with her gaze from behind the half-closed shutters until he disappeared around the corner of Aniksi Avenue, I couldn’t refrain from asking: “Infanta, if you want to see Marios why don’t you come down when he’s here? Or maybe it’s easier to idealize him . . . at a distance, especially when his back is turned?” “Idiot,” she replied, “I was looking at the meadow. Got that? At the meadow.”

  We never talked about it again. Even if I had asked, Infanta wouldn’t have answered. Who knows, I might have been mistaken. Maybe she wasn’t thinking about him and really was looking at the meadow.

  As for Marios, it’s obvious he is only interested in Maria. I figured that out years ago. We were high up in the big fig tree playing knights and castles, having no idea that it would be the last year we would play that game, that we were growing older by the day, by the hour. I saw Marios touch Maria by mistake in the middle of the game. He quickly looked down at the ground where he was standing. We were high up, the queens of the castle, and he was the conqueror below. He grew paler, and paler . . .